Eating the Weeds - Plantain (Not the Banana)

Plantain (aka White Man's Foot, not the banana) has taken over the center of my yard...

It's growing so thick it looks like grass...only now (unlike the picture above) it's sending up seed pods.


Well, those seed pods are suposedly edible, so taking advice from the video below I decided to try some sautéed in butter (I added a little lemon pepper)...

Not Impressed! Phet!

The taste was not bad, but the texture, was, well, very weedy.  Even after cooking it had a "feathery" feel.  So, unless I'm lost in the wilderness starving, I won't be eating these again.  Not the pods at least.  The VERY young plants (you have to get them before they grow hair) are not that bad in salad, and I still may give the seeds a shot, though I doubt I'd have the time or patience to do this...





Plus, the seeds, I gather, can have a laxative affect (they're related to the plant used in Metamucil), so I'm thinking eating them in that amount may not be a great idea.  I might try the seeds as a topping though, like poppy seeds or sesame.

And I also want to try making a salve out of the leaves (one of this plants various uses is as a pain killer...nice for bug bites I've been told).  Theres a bunch of other uses for this plant, which you can learn more about here.

But for now, I had my older boys take a whack at the seed pods with the weed whacker.  There are more plantain plants in my yard right now than I'd ever use, and though they look nice and green and lush now, they'll die off and look ugly mid summer. 

Throwback Thursday