Yet another rainy day and we can’t believe our good fortune – this has been the wettest winter for years and the landscape is celebrating. The hills are lush and bright with wild flowers. And of course, for foragers, there is a bounty of edible wild plants to pick. We started the wild asparagus season early and enjoyed several meals of them, including an excellent asparagus soup.
With my culinary tours I brought a group to the Bedouin village of Kaabiye. Our host, Hussein took us to see edible plants in two surroundings – forest and field. In the forest we found luf, zaatar, asparagus and saina (large bumpy leaves of the sage family), and at the periphery of an agricultural field, we found hubeisa (mallow), selek (wild beet greens), humeida (sorrel) and a thorny plant that we peeled and ate the stalk of.
Afterwards, his wife Riba prepared a meal for us of ftayir, which are pastry turnovers filled with a mixture of wild beet greens, zaatar and hot pepper, saina leaves stuffed with rice, and the greens which we had learned about.
Everyone enjoyed tromping around and learning about the different plants, and of course the meal. But one of the participants told me that the highlight was being a guest in a local Bedouin home, which makes me realize that my culinary tour idea focusing on home hospitality has serious potential.
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