Elsewhere in my wild food adventures, I've used the seeds of Cleavers (also known as Goosegrass) in an attempt to make coffee substitute. Now, in the early spring of 2011, I'm looking to the emerging shoots of the cleavers plant as a fresh green vegetable.
Cleavers
Cleavers, or Goosegrass - Galium aparine - is a wiry, sprawling, twining herbaceaous annual plant common to hedgerows, path edges in woodland and waste ground.
Some other common names for this plant are Stickyweed, Sticky Willie and Catchweed - these (as well as 'Cleavers') refer to the fact that all parts of the plant are covered with tiny bristly hooks making it cling to almost anything - especially soft fabrics.
The plant is in the same botanical family as coffee (Rubiaceae) - you can see what happened when I tried making the seeds into ersatz coffee here.
Quite a few of my wild food reference works discuss Cleavers as wild green vegetable, however, the plant does contain coumarin - and it is therefore probably unwise to consume it in any kind of quantity - and people with health problems, especially of the heart, liver or kidneys, or related to blood clotting, should probably just avoid it altogether.
Proceed, as always, at your own risk...
The plant has leaves arranged in ray-like radial whorls. The stems are ridged and contain tough fibres.
In this picture, you can see the dried, fibrous stems of the previous year's growth above the fresh emerging spring shoots.
I picked a couple of handfuls of the shoots - at this stage of growth, they're not quite so bristly and sticky, and they're also quite soft and sappy - the fibres in the stems haven't fully developed.
Back home, I picked out some bits of grass, twig and other plant species, then rinsed the material in a colander..
I decided to make them into a sort of bhaji-type fritter.
So I mixed a couple of tablespoons of self-raising flour with a teaspoon of curry powder and some snipped chives. To this, I added just enough cold water to make a sticky batter.
I tore the stems in bunches into shorter pieces, then tossed them in the batter with a fork.
There was just enough to give them a good coating.
I divided the mixture into four pieces and dropped it into a hot, oiled frying pan, turning over nd pressing flat after about three minutes, then cooking for a further three minutes on the second side.
When they were done, I drained them on a double sheet of absorbent kitchen paper for five minutes.
The result was a spicy, crispy-at-the-edges fritter with a steamy, doughy centre.
The taste of the plant itself isn't anything remarkable - in fact, the spices almost completely concealed any flavour there might have been, but it's a free green vegetable - and I expect it's probably quite nutritious.
Even with young stems such as these, the end result was still a bit stringy - not unpleasantly so, but I think it would be too tough to eat if picked a month later than this.
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