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Post by Yoris on Apr 10, 2019 23:19:47 GMT -7
Here's a picture of my chicory plant after the first harvest this year. It's pretty good. It's an easy-to-grow [HASH]perennial, it seems. I got the seeds here: dollarseed.com/pd-chicory.cfm [HASH]greens |
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Post by Yoris on May 7, 2019 20:20:49 GMT -7
Here's what it looks like now. It's probably bigger than our sorrel! It's huge! It's probably over twice the size it ever got last year. It's a beautiful plant. I have two new containers of it that I started in the greenhouse (maybe they'll look like this next year).  |
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Post by Yoris on May 7, 2019 20:47:35 GMT -7
I just ate a few leaves. Now they taste like [HASH]grapefruit, except milder and not sweet. They're good. I found a few aphids on the leaves. the leaves are furrier this year (they were quite smooth last year, if I recall correctly).
So, yeah, the taste did change. It didn't taste like lettuce, this time, but it's quite good.
[HASH]aphid [HASH]flavor
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Post by Yoris on May 16, 2019 18:04:45 GMT -7
I harvested the whole above-ground plant, again, today. I should have done it a while ago, though. It had a lot of aphid-like animals on it, as well as a few ladybug larva (most of which I put on our Jerusalem artichokes), a grasshopper, and a couple earwigs (this was after spraying it down with the shower nozzle on the hose pre-harvest).
I'm planning to stew it as greens to eat, but I'm in search of a recipe. I guess Italians use chicory, according to my searches. I had been considering just butter, but we'll see.
It seems that the flower stalks are tender about halfway up, currently. It seems you can tell whether parts of the plant are tender by whether they're easy to break and pull apart.
Note that chicory is said not to be safe for pregnant women.
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Post by Yoris on May 16, 2019 21:24:31 GMT -7
Okay, after washing the leaves, I boiled them all in water on high heat, both young and older leaves, tattered and whole (as well as the tender parts of the flower stalks). I discarded the juice (although you could save it for some stuff, perhaps). I ate half of them plain. They tasted very similar to fresh chicory, actually, and like regular greens. They were still bitter, but palatable, and they made my heart/lung area feel good afterward. I'm impressed at how tender the leaves and parts of the flower stalks are. Almost the whole green part of the plant is edible (even the large leaves). The only fibrous part seems to be the lower half of the flower stalks. I didn't feel like I had eaten too much chicory, which was pretty awesome for a perennial green. (Part of the reason I boiled it and discarded the juice was to dilute its herbal potency somewhat, since I had plenty of it to eat.) So, for my next meal, I scrambled two eggs with it, sesame oil, cinnamon, ginger, garlic salt, black pepper, fenugreek powder, and blue agave sweetener until the chicory juice from the greens was basically gone. The result tastes quite good in flour tortillas (I'm eating it now), and the bitterness seems to be mostly gone. This is a modification of my pseudo-teriyaki egg recipe, but chicory is the primary ingredient here. Here's a picture of an over-stuffed one in a large Mission brand tortilla (this is enough filling for two large tortillas).  I finished off all the food. The over-stuffed tortilla was good, too. There's a grapefruit-ish aftertaste in my mouth now. It's kind of a nice aftertaste, though. I feel pretty good, and satiated, too. All in all, harvesting and using the chicory was a nice success. [HASH]recipe [HASH]egg [HASH]fenugreek |
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Post by Yoris on Jul 10, 2019 20:13:30 GMT -7
Here are the chicory plants, now, including the new ones (which are astonishingly flat). The older plant is flowering, and I've finally decided to let it flower.  |
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