Its the time of year that we start preserving food for the coming winter, and I am currently drying Stinging Nettle (for my own use, I like the fresh spring nettles for house use), Clover for winter chicken feed, and Dandelions Greens, for our house use. I looked at hubby and said, you know that the tray’s will be full now till frost.
Now, I love reading about things and giving them a try, its always eye opening to try something that folks write about, so I am going to give an example, I like Dandelions, I like eating the fresh baby greens, I like drying the older big greens for chicken winter food, I like the baby roots used fresh and I like the big ones dried and used for a hot drink. I adore those yellow flowers, I spend a number of hours each spring picking flowers and making my Dandelion mock honey, which is so good!
I have read a number of folks talking about dipping the flowers into pancake batter and frying them up, so I had to give this a try, I went out and picked half a dozen lovely big flowers, and cleaned them up and had the pancake and cast iron all ready and hit my first stumble.. how do you take off the green, if you leave the green on the flower it has a VERY bitter taste to it, when you make Dandelion honey or jelly, if you want it to turn out to be fab, you need to pull out the flower and leave the green behind.. I will show how it can be done fast when I do the post on how to make the honey version.
As soon as you remove the green, the flower falls apart and you can’t make a fried dipped flower, if you leave the green.. ehhhkkk on the taste, so I picked out the flower part and added them to the batter itself, I used four flowers to one pancake, and while it was pretty with those little yellow flakes, there was no taste added that I or Dh could tell. On the other hand, I think it would great to make matching Dandelion pancakes to go with the syrup.
Ok, so are you eating them with the green on? Are you making a lighter batter and deep frying them? Got a trick to share, because otherwise, this is going in the did it, but not worth it pile for me.. Do you hold the green and only eat out the middle flower part?
Just another Day on the Farm 
Now, that sounds like a LOT of work to get pretty pancakes. LOL
Not really :), it only took a few min to collect, and its always nice to be out in the yard and the fresh air.
Around here I wouldn’t dare pick the dandelions…they belong to the bees who need them for early pollen. Now that the fruit trees are done blossoming there isn’t much out yet. If we’d lived in one of those hoity-toity subdivisions we’d have have huge fines as our lawn is a mass of yellow….and don’t walk there barefoot please! One year long ago my kids picked two grocery bags full of dandelions and we made wine….it was about 1000 proof and at around forever…then one day we were gonna butcher our hogs so we gave it to them. Talk about relaxed piggies! We stick with our homemade grape juice now that Pa has problems with gout.
What zone are you in? if I may ask? The fruit tree’s are just budding out, now the blueberries and the currents are coming into bloom and expect that the strawberries will not be that far behind, we don’t have many dandelions out yet, but I have lots of plants just not alot in flower yet but soon.
Agreed, my yard would not pass in one of those subdivisions either..