live bees stole the show |
I was in my ceremonial pollinator regalia, but the real stars of the show were the honeybees in a glass demonstration hive at the table next to us. Live bees trump top hats.
Bob Wildfong |
We visited The Encampment at Fort York a few days ago (part of the Luminato Festival). Just as the sun set a cloud of June beetles began to fly. This attracted a flock of gulls who swooped amongst the tents gobbling up beetles on the wing. It was a June food moment. I hope someone with a video camera caught that magic moment with white gulls swooping down the aisles of white tents with surprised and in some cases panicked people (a Hitchcock moment, perhaps?).
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin |
On the way to the cottage yesterday we stopped at a farmhouse and bought a pint of freshly picked, unsprayed strawberries. It has been a bit dry this spring, so the berries were not huge and plump the way commercial irrigated varieties are. However what they lost in volume they more than made up for in sweet, concentrated taste. A few weeks ago I watched native bees visiting the wild strawberry flowers in our cottage lawn, and now they are ripe too - tomorrow morning I will pick a few of the tiny but intensely flavorful berries for breakfast.
Sheila Colla, bumblebee expert |
At the Pollinator Festival I ran into bumblebee expert Sheila Colla. She explained to some visitors to the Pollinator booth that we do indeed have two species of bumblebees that have become somewhat more common (perhaps aided by the decline of honeybees), but that we have many fewer of other bumblebee species. This set me to thinking of that bumblebee-pollinated fruit, the blueberry. It's a little early for fresh ones so I bought a bag of frozen wild berries from a store. They are much smaller than the huge but relatively flavorless commercial varieties. Tonight we will have strawberries, blueberries, and wildflower honey on vanilla ice cream as desert. Heaven in a mouthful!
E. Barrie Kavasch |
I have to admit that I got overexcited reading recipes such as "Hickory-Nut Corn Pudding" with its honey, nut butter, and goldenrod flowers, or the "Cranberry-Walnut Cakes" with honey, walnuts, cranberries, and cattail flour (which is actually pollen). Keeping in mind Brillat-Savarin's warnings about excessive sweets, I looked for other dishes for the main course.
It's early in the summer here at the cottage so we don't have spices for making barbecue sauce the way I like it (tragically, the Tabasco sauce got left at home). Nonetheless when I found pork side ribs on sale I felt I must do something with them. Weeding in the garden, I was thinning hundreds of Russian Red kale seedlings and decided to cook them with the pork. Kale is biennial; I always leave a few plants to overwinter and bloom the next June, and today I watched bees visiting their yellow flowers. Seeds from these plants will ripen and drop in the garden and give me seedling to transplant next spring. I've been doing this for 15 years and the garden is always full of kale seedlings.
Mature kale leaves become tough and bitter and need long slow cooking or frost to make them palatable, but seedlings are much tenderer. I harvested a large bunch of them, chopped them finely, mixed them with sage leaves, thyme flowers, and fresh fennel sprout and laid them in the bottom of a ceramic dish. Over them I laid the ribs, then another layer of kale. I poured balsamic vinegar over the mix and then dribbled 2 teaspoons of wildflower honey on top. Covered with foil, the ribs and kale cooked for 5 hours in the oven at about 225F. When served, the kale was delicious!
milkweed - use green buds. Wikimedia. |
I have been encouraging milkweeds for years as a food source for monarch caterpillars, but never imagined I could eat them too. The plants are full of bitter compounds, but boiling the young shoots, leaves, buds, or pods breaks down the bitterness.
Milkweed, kale, honey, strawberries and blueberries; bees and monarchs; a feast to celebrate Pollinator Week!
Sorry we stole the show with the live bees and that I did get a chance to chat with you.
ReplyDelete"Yet, once loose in the great forests with their abundance of tree hollows for nesting in, honeybees probably outran European settlers."
My understanding is that they were referred to as the white-mans fly and their presence was thought to signal that the white people were coming. There's an interesting account of the arrival of honeybees in North America in 'sweetness and light' by Hattie Ellis.
Your culinary adventures are inspiring.