Harvest - June 18, 2007
I'm back, as promised-- we finally got the last kinks worked out of our broken computers yesterday, so after a little more fine-tuning, I'll finally have a chance to catch up on everyone's happenings.
A lot has happened in the garden since my last post. We've had some nice rains over the past week, and everything seems to be taking off. Right now, I'm harvesting bountiful quantities of radishes, lettuce, arugula, and swiss chard, but the surprise bumper crop of the moment is the French sorrel that I started from seed in early spring. My herb bed is full of its lush, tart foliage. Salmon with sorrel sauce is on the menu for tomorrow-- I can hardly wait.
I've actually never grown or even eaten sorrel prior to this spring, but the flavor of the raw stems and leaves is both familiar and nostalgic for me. Its tang comes from oxalic acid, a distinctive taste component in both rhubarb (a relative of sorrel) and wood sorrel (genus Oxalis). It's probably more likely that you've tasted rhubarb than wood sorrel, but as it happens, there was a patch of wood sorrel growing through a neighbor's fence into my parents' yard when I was a kid, so despite having a rhubarb patch now, wood sorrel is closer to my heart. I have fond memories of sitting out in the California shade and chewing on its crisp, succulent stems. The taste of French sorrel brings that memory right back, so lately it's not unusual to see me out grazing in the garden in the afternoons.
Since I've digressed into the subject of oxalis, I guess I should mention that as with rhubarb and French sorrel, it's possible to have too much of a good thing. Rhubarb leaves are considered toxic due to high concentrations of oxalic acid, and sorrel and wood sorrel can produce the same effects in large quantities. On a more epicurean note, there are many weedy species of oxalis (you know, those little shamrock plants in the lawn with yellow flowers and nasty pollen?), but those species probably aren't what you want to eat. First off, the stems are too tiny; second-- lawn pesticides, yuck! I don't have species for the types I remember from childhood, but they resembled the illustrations of Oxalis pre-caprae and Oxalis violacea on the right hand side of this page at Wikipedia.
I love reading about foraging for wild goodies like wood sorrel and will probably make more foraging posts in the future, but for now, I'll leave you with a link to images of wood sorrel being foraged in places like Central Park (wow!) If you have the time and inclination, the entire website is filled with fascinating photos of wild edibles (and inedibles). Enjoy!
