A yellow, Texas Dawn, and a dark red, Midnight Ruby…hardies, to live in the deep end of our pond and take the place of the winter-shield during the summer. A tangle of lily roots and pads and blooms is an anti-predator measure that’s pretty besides. We have as many as 6 lily blooms at any moment this year, really nice, and the shallow end of the pond is mostly covered with them. The lotus the raccoon tried to eat is now two plants and going strong: blooming, and very pretty.
And Jane and I had a story conference today that is going to nudge me out of a stuck spot in fine fashion, so all in all a good day.
There’s a medical clinic with a very large parking lot a little up from us, and we decided to drive up there, park at the far end of the lot, and take a walk up the sidewalk and back—a level, predictable surface. Jane’s been having a very sore hip, and me, I’m incredibly out of shape. I did that walk and have been gimping about the rest of the day. We are resolved to start doing this and get ourselves back in shape.
As I understand it, both the seeds and roots of lotus are quite tasty. I wonder if that is also true of other water lilies.
Many water plants are edible. Learned that in survival class. Unfortunately some aren’t. Cattail root is ok. So is, ucccch! yucca, not a water plant, which is a lot like chewing on rope to try to make it edible. Don’t swallow it—I can’t swear to what would happen, but I can’t think it would be pleasant…
From what I remember, yucca was used by the Native Americans as a soap substitute, so no, not so tasty. Emergency rations only. *channels Euell Gibbons*
courtesy wildwoodsurvival.com
Waterlilies. Almost all waterlilies (Nymphaea and Nuphar species) are edible and can be gathered most of the year. During the summer months, when the rootstocks become mushy and rather tasteless, they’re still an excellent source of survival food. Additionally, the young, unfurling leaves and unopened buds can be prepared as a potherb. The seeds can be parched, winnowed, and ground into a nutritious flour, and the potato-shaped tubers of the tuberous waterlily (N. tuberosa) can be dug from the mud and prepared like—what else?—potatoes. Two of the more common edible varieties are the yellow pond lily and the fragrant pond lily. (Be careful, though, to collect any such plants from pollution-free waters!)
I still have my old copy of the Boy Scout Handbook, it taught plenty of survival skills…identified edible plants, etc…..glad I held onto it.
Try a Chinese cookbook for recipes using lotus seeds and lotus root.
One of my favorite vegetarian dishes is a vegetable stew called either ‘Buddha’s Delight’ or ‘Food for the Forty Minor Gods’. It has several different varieties of mushrooms, unusual (to Western palates) roots, including sliced lotus root, broccoli, and other assorted vegetables, both familiar and un. I was introduced to it during an all-night firing of a kiln at a local Zen Buddhist temple, and felt bad for not bringing something to add to the potluck, considering how much of it I ate!
…and I just looked up the recipe, and the first place I ran across it was this blog, from 6 years ago! D’oh!
If the new waterlilies take over the deep end of the pond, will you still be able to get the fish’s observation dome into position? If I remember correctly, it was only possible to wrestle it underwater in the deepest part of the pond, and the water level had to be hyper-filled as well.
Oh, absolutely. You just have to go in and hold it under forcefully. The fish move it about with their tail-power, and water lilies just move a bit. And we don’t have that much coverage of lilies, just hopefully enough to keep the fish safe from eagles.
I’m intrigued by that recipe, but unlikely to cook it myself.
Oranges are not the only fruit: Seems I bought a whole bag of ~grapefruit~ yesterday, thinking I was getting big oranges. Duh. I didn’t want the little bitty Clementine oranges right next to them. I didn’t see any other bags of oranges, so I got what I thought were oranges…only to discover today, I have a whole bag of ~grapefruit~. Fortunately, I don’t take any meds, so nothing to interfere with the grapefruit or vice versa. I’m not allergic. Breakfast at my grandmother’s, when I was a kid and teen, often invoved starting with half a grapefruit and a little salt, with whatever else was for breakfast, such as oatmeal or eggs and bacon and toast. But I haven’t had grapefruit in ages. Whoa. Sour!
Any ideas on how one guy can get through a whole bag of grapefruit, possibly 11 more, before they spoil, would be appreciated. Relish with cranberry sauce? Maybe a dessert bread or cookies, with bits of grapefruit cooked in? I don’t know. But I can say that eating a whole grapefruit, rather than half, was too much, this afternoon. LOL! Not bad, just…quite strange and sour, when one was looking forward to an orange, quite a lot. Heh, this will be the last grapefruit I get for a long while, too. :snerk: I could see atevi going for grapefruit, though.
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Over on John Scalzi’s blog, amongst other books he got in for review, is Lucy and Andy Neanderthal by, er, Greg Brown or Scott Brown, I didn’t retain the name, sorry. Seems he (Brown) also cartooned the Star Wars Academy books, including “Vader’s Little Princess.” Heheh. The Lucy and Andy Neanderthal book looks super. The Amazon reviews are high, from adults and kids, mostly parents saying how much they and their kids loved it, some adults too. The editorial review says Grades 2 through 5, but judging by the adults, I’d say it’s suited for any age level. The review also says each chapter has notes from an “archeological team” at Lucy and Andy’s cave, and there’s an author’s note at the end with resources on real-world Neanderthals, probably with a kid-friendly bent. This looked really super. I can’t do it this month, but maybe next month. It looks like it’d be great fun for any toon and SF&F fans, and good for both kids and grownups. I thought it was worth mentioning over here, for fans and for the librarians here. 😉
If the thought of eating a bagful of grapefruit is too much to face, it might be wasteful, but you could always juice them. It will also let you sweeten it a little if needed.
Good pointer on the Lucy and Andy Neanderthal. Our kids’ collection is a little thin on factual information about earlier hominids, so this might be a good thing to pick up for us.
Grapefruit marmalade?
I sugar them instead of salting. Also, it is possible to segment and freeze them.
That would be good.
Ooh, thanks for spotting this Paleontology book, BCS! I decided in fourth grade that I would become either an archaeologist or an anthropologist after reading a (kid’s) book, First Men of the World. When I first started teaching Physical Anthro/Human Evolution, I went in to my now local library and, surprisingly, found the book again. The book was old in the late 60’s. It was delightful but shocking to find it still on the children’s room shelf. I took it out and It was still an absolute page turner… but none of the info even in the 90’s considered accurate (most has been overthrown yet again).
Now I’m always on the lookout for currently accurate kid’s books on human evolution. Someday I’d like to write one of my own, but not until I get several other, fiction projects wrapped up… and the human family tree (well, it is a very branchy bush right now) settle down again for a bit so a book has a chance to still be up to date by publication.
I’ve marked this Lucy and Andy book for future purchase myself. Many of my students are studying to be school teachers. I like to give them solid kid’s book bibliographies as well as accessible, popular/accessible academic adult book ones of works I’ve read.
It looked like Lucy and Andy Neanderthal was primarily a comic, with the end-chapter and author’s afterword having a toon-world but more real world relevant set of learning resources, in a way that kids could be entertained and learn something, and have further reading if they wanted to pursue it. So I didn’t get to “look inside” the book itself, but from the description and couple of illustrations, it looked marvelous.
As a kid in the 70’s, I remember we always got to watch the National Geographic Specials on the then-current Leakeys’ research at Olduvai and Jane Goodall’s chimpanzee research and various Jacques Cousteau undersea specials. These were superb.
I’ve seen a few documentaries on current discoveries and reassessments of the early homind “branchy bush.” Really fascinating how much is new and how much we don’t know about the great apes and our own human branches, cousins to them.
Back in 4th grade, I think it was, I surprised my science teacher by announcing I wanted to be a paleontologist when I grew up. She had me spell it. She wasn’t sure I knew what it was. (She later told my mom she had to look it up to be sure too.) Heh. — Back then, there were several good kid-friendly science books on dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals and other science subjects. (One of the two or three series, besides individual books, was from the same people who did the Little Golden Books.) So in addition to dinosaurs, you might a book on, say, the solar system, or time, or other science-friendly subjects. These were terrific. There were a couple of local bookstores besides B. Dalton’s and Waldenbooks, and my mom made redular (monthly?) trips, so I got many of these. — Funnily enough, one of those books on dinosaurs, with an Allosaurus on the front, is held up by Raymond Burr in the original Godzilla movie. I was tickled when I had the same book for real. 😀
There was also some interest in speculative stuff like Bigfoot / Sasquatch and other things popular back then. It ws OK to be curious, even if htose might be more tall tales than truth. (Though I think it might be possible there are hominids like that, more likely in Asia than here, but possibly here. I don’t know.)
My own interests ended up going more towards languages, once I had my first foreign language class in 7th grade, but as early as 11 or 12, I was already interested in the alphabet and calligraphy and fonts, and how and why people spoke words, language.
Heh, when the first Jurassic Park movie came out, I got a big kick out of the boy being a dinosaur nut, a walking encyclopedia. That felt very familiar. 🙂 — But I think he did far better than I would have done against those velociraptors and all. :O
I’d love to see more adult-level and more kid-level books out there on early hominids and how we got from apes to modern humans, and the branches along the way. There wasn’t enough on prehistoric mammals when I was a kid.