Learning from the first Americans

Before I set off for America, I mentioned to my daughter Lizzie that I’d love to know more about the first Americans who lived in Western USA.  Wow!  What an experience! Deepest gratitude goes to her and her family for enabling me to see so much. 

This is where I learned not to sneer at Bison meat and edible flowers.  They are both delicious.

U.S. Mothers Day – 12^th May — Pow Wow in Stanford, California.  Gathers 22000 to 30000 people from across North America.  Astonishing drumming, dancing, joyous singing, ringing bells, and colour.  Each dance starts with prayer and is rooted in healing.  The culmination was a dance by vast numbers of women of all ages in a circle.  As they danced the announcer praised them, their mothers, and their ancestors as the healers of society.  (Healers?  We executed them as witches!)

A sign to remind me of words written elsewhere:  we will not have peace on Earth until we have Peace with Earth. 

Three Sisters Salad

In this salad, to understand the biological interplay of the three sisters — sweet corn, squash, and beans, you will want to read Professor Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the teaching of Plants. She explains it admirably. It is yet another thing our foremothers knew and practised long before our scientific minds had acknowledged it.

I was delighted into stunned amazement just to see the vast choice of fruits and veg available in the football-field sized grocery shop we visited.    Many of you, also, have a wide variety of choices.  I cannot even begin to offer substitutes for this salad.  But maybe, if you start with the three sisters – squash, sweet corn, and beans, you might make your own special salad.    Do let us know in the “Comments” section.  I’d love to try your version.

The salad dressing:

Juice of 2 limes

2 Tablespoons Elderberry Balsamic Vinegar

2 tablespoons maple sugar or honey

¼ cup sunflower oil

1 – 2 fresh jalapenos, stems, seeds and ribs removed, cut up

(or use sweet peppers for a less spicy dressing)

Put these ingredients in a blender to make the salad dressing, seasoned with salt and pepper.  Place in a jar in fridge.

The salad

1 ½ cups corn cut from the cob  (uncooked)

2 diced lemon cucumbers (out of season at the time, so we used one normal one.)

1 cup purslane (we used extra salad leaves)

1 cup sunflower sprouts

1 cup finely shredded kale

1 cup leaves, seed flowers, and/or chopped stems of amaranth (aka pigweed or wild spinach)

1 tablespoon lemon thyme leaves.

1 1/2 cups of cooked beans, rinsed.

The Topping.

Top with ½ cup sunflower seeds, toasted in a dry frying pan.

We also used toasted amaranth seeds, just to see them pop!  [all over the kitchen].

Mix and enjoy.  The dressing is especially good. On anything.

Supplementary pictures with thanks to Lizzie, the Stanford Daily, and the website.