Flowers and Candy...and Wounds?

Ooh, it is a kitchen day!  Free of crazy four year old twins, Stone and I created some scrumptiousness that had been in the kitchen queue for a while.

Seaweed gomasio set it all off.  The smell of gently toasting sesame seeds wafting through the house in enough, but add a little bit o sea salt, some kelp powder and dulse flakes, and wow!  We top salads, greens, any roasted or sauteed veggie, eggs, and everything in between with gomasio.  The seaweed is my personal favorite because of its enhanced nutrient qualities.  Check out Susun Weed's fabulous seaweed article to find out everything it can do for you!

I couldn't stop there, we moved on to pasteli, a Greek honey sesame candy, a recipe found at Nourished Kitchen.  I adapted it a bit by using rose infused honey and adding local bee pollen.  So good!  By this time I was feeling inspired, so we headed outside for some foraging.

There were still plenty of luscious dandelion and young yellowdock greens to be had, not to mention daylily, elder, and red clover flowers.  Um, fritters!!!  So, adapting Rosalee de la Foret's recipe found in her Wild Foods Cookbook (available from Herbmentor only as far as I know, but check out Rosalee's blog and see what you can find) to our gluten-free, dairy-free home, we had fritters of all three flowers.  I used half garbanzo bean and half brown rice flour (a rare treat, we are pretty grain-less all around) instead of wheat flour, and seasoned lightly with rosemary and thyme (I didn't want to overpower the flavor of the flowers).  Phenomenal.  My men were shoveling them in with no room for comment.  That is what I like at the dinner table :)

After dinner we headed out to harvest some more elderflowers for wine.  We had to climb, or scramble, over a fence to get there.  Silly me, skirt, fence climbing...massive chunk of flesh missing from my thigh.  It was actually hanging off of the wire...gross.  Besides the pain, I am a little excited because this is the first wound I have had in years, and I get to practice treating an especially nasty one!  In the field I dressed it in plantain until I could get home.  After rinsing, I have dressed it in honey and "bandaged" it with a plantain leaf.  It is feeling much better, and tomorrow I will probably apply my all-purpose yarrow, plantain and neem salve.  I am waiting for the beginning of a scab before applying comfrey, which I think will be needed as it is pretty wide, but nice and jagged for strong healing. 

Exciting stuff, eh?