Eat Your Weeds

Much of my job entails going out to the surrounding villages, giving a presentation on nutrition and pneumonia and/or diarrhea (as these are the 2 leading causes of preventable infant deaths in the country), and the class follows with a cooking demonstration in one of the women's kitchens. We make everything from soy milk from scratch, soy chorizo, tortillas fortified with green leaves or pureed carrots, and chicken and vegetable soup made with local vegetables brought by the women.... all in a Lencan woman's tiny kitchen with no modern amenities.

During one of my first trips out to an aldea, the women and I were gathering leaves to grind and add to the maseca for tortillas, when someone shouted, "mira, espinaca!"... they found spinach. You couldn't have imagined my delight at hearing the word! Someone has spinach?! So we walk on over to where the women are pulling the leaves, and my heart sinks. "Ummmm.... that's not spinach. That's a weed..." I wanted to say, as they smiled and fervently pulled bunches for lunch. But, I didn't say anything and just watched as they added the leaves to the mixture and we went on with lunch. I figured if 10 mothers were eating the stuff, I wasn't going to die. And, low and behold, I didn't :)

So, being me, I went home and scoured the internet until I found an identical leaf structure and started researching exactly what it was. Turns out, it's what we would call Lambs Quarters, and most people in the US just pull it up like it's a weed. I then went to nutritiondata.com (only go there if you really want to feel bad about eating something unhealthy.... there are always way more calories than you think.... don't do it!) Anyway, I compared the nutritional content to that of what we would call spinach, and it's pretty spot on! So, feel free to eat your weeds! Well, this weed (I read somewhere that it has a large amount of oxalic acid, so in case that's an issue...)

I remembered there being a 4 foot tall stalk of lambs quarters in the backyard when we went to look at the house we are currently renting and instantly got excited. Of course our landlords, who were trying to be very nice, chopped (well... macheted) down our entire back yard right before we moved. They left a few flowers and the huge elephant ears, thankfully. So, I've spent the last three months waiting and hoping more would pop up... and just like a weed, I found 10 sprouting all of the yard.

Yesterday, I cleared out a spot in our yard and transplanted every single one to the new space to cultivate. And, nicely enough, while clearing up the spot, I found 5 small green bean vines!

Lambs Quarters

Green Beans!

Over the last month, while poking around in the yard, I've been finding edibles all over the place. While clearing out some sugar cane (it's taking over the backyard!) I found what the locals call pepinitos, or mini cucumbers. They're growing on the back fence and are the size of a chubby pinky at maturity. We also have swiss chard from the former volunteer living in the house, our sweetsop tree is overloaded with fruit, we're getting 3-5 patastes weekly from our vine, and our plum tree just started producing. We've made some good friends out of neighbors by giving them fruits and veggies from the yard... Neither one of us can stand pataste, and I can only eat so much sweetsop, so it works out for everybody :)

I can't believe the garden I have... and I barely did a thing! To compensate, I've planted pak choi and more swiss chard, garlic, ginger root, lavender and rosemary so far. I hope to plant much more, but Jacob and I are currently working with the local daycare on a vegetable garden, and that's taken up alot of time and energy (will blog about that later).

Anyway, I'll end on a few pics of flowers that just popped up in the yard this week... so nice!