Monday 14 September 2009

Hairy Plug Monster Himalyan Balsam and Oat Biscuits.

Around about this time of year, scores of well meaning Sunday Warriors put on their wellies and head for the countryside with a single malicious intent.

""TO BASH THE BALSAM""

I have often been tempted to join then, but have always found something else better to do with my time, after all. its not an easy task


Impatiens Glandilifera to give it its proper name, is an aggressive wildflower that is slowly but surely overpowering the indigenous flora.

Helped by it's powerful seed dispersal system that causes the pod to explode when the seeds are ready, launching the seeds over a fairly large distance. Even now, as I approach my forties - I still get the same pleasure when I trigger one of these pods - just as I did when I was a boy.


Attempts at slowing down the spread of Himalayan Balsam seen ineffective and as a former landscaper, the progress that the "Balsam Bashing Hoodies" make is pitiful and even over that last few years, the spread in my "neck of the woods" has been quite alarming.


However, during this year I have become more aware of wild foods that are growing around us and regularly venture out with my daughters to harvest what ever we can find, to take home and sample. When I am unsure, I will get a plant ident from about four separate sources on google so I can find out its properties, and when I am totally satisfied that the plant is edible - I will try some.

Sometimes we get lucky and discover something that is both edible and more importantly, tasty.

One of my favourite web sites http://www.eatweeds.co.uk/ had link to a fellow forager who had published a recipe using Himalayan Balsam seeds as a base for a curry..... cool.



Yesterday was time to harvest. As quite a lot of the seed pods were ripe, Arisha gently bent the stem while I put a plastic bag over the flower head and collected quite a lot of seeds with relative ease. It wasn't long before it seemed like we had enough and went home.



The seeds looked like those tiny licorice IMPS they used to sell and when eaten raw, bore a really strong resemblance to a walnut in taste. After I had seperated the seeds from the rest of the pods I had about 200g of seeds which I then toasted in a dry frying pan.

They stayed on my kitchen top for a day, until late Sunday night, when I decided to experiment, and think I invented The Hairy Plug Monster Balsam and Oat Biscuit.

The whole process was quite lax, and the measurements are vague, but here goes:


Cream some butter with some sugar, then mix in some oats and plain flour with a pinch of salt.

Add the Balsam seeds and conbine the mixture into a firm ball.

Allow to rest in the fridge, before rolling out on a clean surface and cutting into small biscuits.

Bake in the oven at 200 for 15 minutes, turn the biscuits over and bake for another 5 minutes

Remove biscuits from the oven and allow to cool.



That is all you need to do - the result is a "hob-nobbishly" biscuit with a distinct nutty taste rather similar to seseme or sunflower seeds... ( if you cannot make head nor tail of my recipe, substitute it for a general biscuit one )

At a rough guess I probably used about 1000 seeds, so if everybody makes one batch of biscuits, it will take care of the balsam problem. More importanly though, the seeds will more than likely have the same nutritional properties as other seeds and it seems scandalous to destroy this free source of protein, instead of harvesting it and inhibiting the spread.

Balsam Bashing doesn't seem to work, but I think that if more people knew about the other properties then there may be a chance to protect the countryside, whilst at the same time make use of this invasive but tasty plant.

I would be interested to know what ideas other people come up with, I think that there is probably another two weeks before the season will finish, so I am going out again to harvest more seeds and come up with even more recipes.

One final note though, because at the end of the day Himalayan Balsam is invasive, please be careful where you discard the green waste. It is not advisable to put it in a compost bin.

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