Over the weekend I noticed the invasive weed, garlic-mustard in my yard was at its peak Spring form. While on my daily walk I noticed that several other non-American forgers must have noticed this too. The edges of the woods were spotted with Asian people with very large plastic bags filled with green park property . I approached an older women and asked her what she was picking and what she was going to do with her mother load. It turns out these pickers are from Cambodia and are also picking garlic mustard and will pickle it. The woman said something to the man that I presumed to be her husband and he gave me the recipe in a bit less broken English. He told me the “pickle last long, year” Really?? I gathered from our give and take and mostly my hand motions that there is a fermenting process where you put something heavy on top, maybe. Anyways there is always Google! Or this recipe I found. I made pesto with my weeds, and it was tasty!

PESTO

1/2 cup olive oil

1 cup pine nuts or walnuts (I threw in a few raw pumpkin seeds too)

1/2 cup grated parmesean cheese (I used nutritional yeast to make it dairy-free)

4 cups garlic mustrd leaves (washed well)

I added a couple of cloves of garlic and salt too.

Put nuts and garlic and leaves in food processor, then add oil and cheeses and process more.

Serve with pasta or rice. I added mine to hummus and used as a dip and a salad dressing.

When harvesting garlic-mustard: take out by the roots before it flowers. Young leaves are the tastiest for pesto, eaten raw or lightly steamed. Remove roots from area or they will continue to grow.

Ginger came home with these cute little butterflies she made at school.

We had all the supplies so today the girls worked on tie-dying some coffee filters. We didn’t have the same clothes pins but if you are going to have to buy some for this craft, I like the way the rounded top, non-spring ones look best. We used some nifty new liquid watercolors diluted in a bit of water but by the results I think food coloring would work just as well.

We used q-tips to drip the colors onto coffee filters. Molly ended up making a mobile with her finished butterflies.

I had great photographic results with the watch I lent Ginger, that my husband then ran over with the car in the drive way , that I just couldn’t decide which photos to use for todays entry in the 30 day Macro Challenge!

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