Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Canna I eat it? YeS!

So, the recent storm/hurricane like conditions that passed through here recently surprisingly did not screw up my vegetable garden.

The tomatoes are doing fine, malabar spinach is loving the water, the bean trellis broke a little, but I just propped it up a bit. Dittany of Crete (herb, member of Oregano family) got waterlogged and isn't looking great (aka all the leaves fell off) but I have a cutting when it broke earlier, so hopefully that will survive.

The real damage happened in the flower garden areas, with the tallest of my Bells of Ireland (interestingly spicy smelling I found out) flopped over a broke, Calla lilies sagged sadly and my cannas, those got majorly icked over and were so heavy and sort tall they decided to fall over in the soft waterlogged hill patch I have them in, so I decided to take all my sad flowers and make the very rare bouquet in my house:
No huge loss as I have a ridiculous number of cannas and I was thinking of giving half of them away anyways, but I have been thinking about their edibility and my research shows, DELICIOUS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canna_(plant)
http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/proceedings1996/V3-507.html

Glass/cellophane noodles are Asian noodles that can be made with various types of starches, primarily mung beans, but cannas are rising in popularity as their starch has been found to be apparantly quite excellent in noodle making. You can find glass noodles in Asian stores, in restaurants usually in spring rolls, or basic noodle dishes...mmmm....


(Thanks to http://maona.net for pic)
Though the idea of making glass noodles may be somewhat time consuming, I understand that you can eat the tubers like potatoes anyways... we'll see, if people don't want cannas, what better way to use them than to FEED!??