Milkweed for dinner?

Last week I stumbled upon this article about all of the ways you can eat milkweed and I must say it has my interest piqued! The author claims there are 5 different parts of the plant you can eat, and what he does with the insides of the pods to make a cheese sauce substitute downright intrigues me. I’m not sure they intrigue me in a good way, but I am curious!

One thing we have in our yard is milkweed. Family members are forbidden to chop it, trim it or otherwise harm it since it brings our wonderful monarchs -- one of whom emerged as a butterfly in its box in our living room this morning and will be released in a few minutes when its wings are fully dry!

Milkweed also makes a nice privacy screen.  I love it and am thankful that so far nobody has complained that we have it, since it is classified as a "secondary noxious weed" in Minnesota and can be prohibited in counties that formally request it (so far no Minnesota counties have).

The idea that we could not just use it for raising caterpillars and attracting butterflies but for supper is a wee bit tempting. As homeschoolers, we are also a family who loves odd experiments!

I ordered a book through interlibrary loan from Rock County Library called “Edible Wild Plants of the Prairie” and I thought it could lead to all sorts of wonderful culinary adventures where we found tasty new things for supper in our own back yard.

Yeah… not so much.

The book is from 1987 and the illustrations are black and white sketches. I’m sorry, but if I’m going to feed my beloved family something I got from the lawn or woods, I am going to require at least a color photo to make sure I’m not feeding them something that’s going to cause their livers to shut down.

Still, I do love the idea of getting more of our foods from our own environment. We grow lots of things that we munch on in the back yard (raspberries, all sizes of tomatoes, chocolate mint, spearmint, parsley, asparagus, strawberries…) and I try to plant ornamentals that are also edible. Our shrubs are a type of cherries, for instance, the nasturtium flowers and leaves go into our salads, and even the roses make hips for tea and petals for jelly.

I’m still deciding whether I’ll try cooking milkweed for supper sometime soon.  If nothing else, I really want to try harvesting the new stalks next spring when they are supposed to resemble asparagus.

If we never do eat it, it’ll still be worth it. We’ll still happily search for new happy insect inhabitants, we’ll still bring the leaves in for our fattening caterpillars each day and we’ll happily burst the pods in the fall and send downy seeds to the four winds.

But I am intrigued about the taste of all of those parts now….

Like this article?  Click the subscribe button above to be notified when new articles are posted in this column!