Lawn Salad Challenge

Q: How many edible weeds can you fit in a spring salad? A: As many as you can find! Seriously, how about 8 for starters? Most can be found in an ordinary suburban garden, and can usefully and tastefully pretty up a basic cos lettuce or if you must buy it, a bag of salad leaves from the supermarket. Oh yes - I don't want to be accused of cheating, so flowers count as one ingredient; flowers and leaves of the same plant also one ingredient. here's my score card for 19 March 2009: a lot came from my garden lawn but I also looked in the flower beds and on the veg patch too.
Common Daisy Bellis perennis - young fleshy leaves and freshly opened flowers
Primrose Primula vulgaris Very young leaves and flowers
Dandelion Taraxacum officinale - young leaves and older ones with the midrib removed
Sweet violet Viola odorata flowers - beautifully scented and slightly peppery
Chickweed Stellaria media - leaves minus stems which are a bit stringy
Ground elder Aegopodium podagraria young leaves, still shiny and crinkly have a celery-like flavour
Honesty Lunaria biennis seedlings - another peppery crunch element
Common Dock Rumex obtusifolius - very, very young leaves and only a couple they can be quite bitter and dominating as a flavour.
A few places are still available on my wild food in the woods course 17-19th April 2009 -save money and eat healthily by getting the essential wildfood collecting, cooking and eating knowledge - outdoors!

The chicken day

Funny how things come in threes....
On a wild goose chase today ( excuse the phrasing!) for a free range chicken, I eventually tracked a 'Label Anglais' one down at a butcher's on the other side of town, late on when the traffic was beginning to get nightmarish. So many agressive motorists hogging the kirb side, making life harder for us bikies, grrr! So I took the longer but less traffic clogged way home across the common, and was rewarded by my second 'chicken' , a big clump of chicken-of-the-woods fungus on one of the old riverside willow trees, just above head height! Rich pickings indeed.
At the base of the tree there was my third chicken of the day - a lovely lush patch of young chickweed! I haven't decided what to do with my forage haul yet, I was set on a Thai chicken curry but that was this morning. Humm, time to get a bit of inspiration with a nice cuppa!