Spinach and their roots!

Nothing overwhelmingly interesting today, and no long drawn out posts either, mostly because I have two huge ones in the works plus the "Garden in July" post which will be in next week.

Today I picked all the spinach, steamed it lightly, and bagged it for the freezer just as I did with the beet greens. The spinach was gigantic (Vancouver variety from west coast seeds - zone 8) with thick stems and great big roots. When all was said and done we ended up with nearly 5lbs according to the kitchen scale, 5 lbs. of spinach wilts down to a pretty pathetic little pile, but it was enough to make 3 freezer bags full even after I cooked some for lunch.

Below is a picture of  a the spinach harvest, this was 1 of 2 big bowls.

Once all the spinach was packed away I went outside to clean up the stalks and roots and had an idea. As far as I knew the entire spinach plant was edible and the leftover stalks and roots were big and juicy, but were they also edible? I rushed back inside to Google it and came up with two things, one was that the roots were edible after being boiled and number two, they were bitter!

Of course I got excited because if an edible plant has a bitter root it probably means it is medicinal as a bitter (bitters react on the digestive tract and increase bile production to aid in the processing of nutrients and also stimulate/clean the liver). I had to try it, I bit into one after washing it and sure enough it was just a little less bitter than a dandelion root (dandelion root is probably one of the most bitter substances I have EVER tasted, supposedly bitter lettuce is worse - I will report if I ever get the courage to try it).

Below is a picture of some of my spinach stalks and roots.

I finished cleaning the roots of dirt and scraped off the external membrane. They all went into a pot where they simmered for 30 minutes (whole, I did not cut them). Afterward they were soft though fibrous and tasted like turnips! Waste not, want not I suppose, I was happy to try something new.

I seeded the next spinach crop and will try this again in roughly five weeks, this time I will use the raw root to see if a proper bitter tincture/decoction can be made from it.

Happy Spinaching!
- Nicey