More on Cattails

Good morning! Welcome back to Ridin’ Out the Recession, and thank you all for stopping by to visit, and sit with us a spell!

FIRST…GREAT NEWS…Deb got her first test results back today…finally! It seemed like forever, to be honest with you people!

This was the test checking out her bones. According to the tests, her bones are 100% clean!! We both were ecstatic when we were told!

Let me say this, and it comes from the bottom of our hearts…Thank you all so very, very much for your support, concern and prayers! You are all just wonderful people, and we’re indebted to you all, thank you again!

Please continue praying for Deb, as she still has the glucose, which is a radium injection from my understanding, this coming Monday morning. This will tell us if cancer is to be found anywhere else in her body. I’m sure there are plenty out there who know much more about all this than Deb or I, but unfortunately, we’re learning more in this regard.

We’re still under the impression surgery will be the week of the 25th as well, but this may be put back, as the test we’re having done Monday, was supposed to have been done today. But this was postponed as she had a problem with her EKG, so today she had to undergo a stress test, instead of the glucose. Anyway…

Cattails

Yesterday we were discussing cattails, sofkee, and had just started with Koonti flour, and I found it interesting enough to talk on it just a little more today.

If you remember, Bonnie had described to us how she liked to prepare the cattails.

“The first ones I ate were just boiled in a little pot, drained, and eaten with a dab of salt. Good stuff… I later gathered some, sliced them and put them in a skillet with some green beans for a type of stir-fry dish. Maybe it was just the bacon drippings that I insist on using, but again, they were great!”

She made it clear she hadn’t liked the flour made from the cattails, but as you see she did like sprouts. These she found by feeling around under the water and was harvesting the “bulges” on the roots, then prepared them as described above.

You know, originally I thought, and don’t ask me why, but probably my thinking the cattails couldn’t survive the harsh Northern winters, that cattails only grew in the States where warmer weather year round occurred.

But, as usual I was wrong. Deb is getting ready for a stress test today and is not here with me while writing this today. If she was, I definitely would not have used the term…I was wrong! Especially I was wrong as usual, for sure!

After research though, these dern things grow almost everywhere…I saw pictures of them as far north as Canada!

Without prior knowledge, I’ve learned cattails are actually used for a number of things. Some include the stuffing for pillows and mattresses, rope, and weaving material, and recently were involved in the discussion of the BP oil spill in the Gulf.

The talk was the proposed benefits of harvesting the cattails and using them as a type of absorbent in the cleanup process.

It seems many parts of the cattail are edible. Some of which are the shoots, the rootstock, the stalks, but catching them while they’re young, tender, and no more than three feet tall, the male flower spikes, and even the pollen.

The shoots or pointed ends of the rootstock, or bulges as Bonnie describes them, can be eaten raw in salads, or cooked as Bonnie describes.
The root section in the picture above can be eaten raw as well, or cooked like potatoes. The stalks if caught under three feet, can be pulled up on and the white part cooked as Bonnie describes in regards to the shoots, or bulges.

The male flower heads appear as spikes above the female flower heads or the brown flower heads that look like corndogs to me. Cook these male flower heads just like corn on the cob…butter, salt and pepper used the same way.

The pollen is yellow, and found on the male mature male flower spikes. Collect it in plastic bags, or pail, run it through a sieve, but it doesn’t wet easily, so it works better if mixed with regular flour, and can be used in any of your recipes calling for flour.

To read more:

Let me quickly share another link with you guys I found very informative. I will be trying several things off this site. Pull it up and check it out. I thing you will enjoy it.

Koonti:

The Koonti plant was introduced into Florida over 500 years ago by the Tequesta Indians. This plant was a food staple of the Seminole Indians.
Although the Koonti plant is poisonous, if prepared properly it was used as flour, much preferred by the Indians versus cattail flour.

Unlike the Koonti plant, the cattail itself is not poisonous, but there are many different varieties of plants that look very similar to the cattail that are poisonous, so in harvesting them you have to be sure they are cattails. Once again, the defining characteristic being the brown, corn dog looking female flower head at the end of the stalk.

The Seminoles, and other Indians as well I’m sure, learned a process which extracted the poison out of the Koonti, which allowed this to become an edible dish. This process, crudely is as follows;

The Indians gathered the roots and washed them. These were then brought to a Koonti log which was a large pine with holes cut about 9 inches wide at the top, then tapering down to a point further down into the log. Picture an upside down “dunce cap,” as the guy describing this to you, isn’t far from being one himself, and this was the first example that came to my mind.

After the Koonti had been chopped into smaller pieces, it was then placed into the holes in the Koonti log. From there it was beaten into a pulp, by wooden poles. The hole in the tree acted as the mortar, and the wooden poles were used as the trestles in this part of the process.

Once the Koonti was beaten into a pulp, it was taken to a creek or river and saturated with water in a wooden container.

The Indians had a makeshift strainer system set up, with one tarp-like straining cloth suspended over a lower deerskin catch trough.

The Koonti starch was washed with water, and thus strained through the straining cloth, and into the deerskin catch trough below. Once all the Koonti pulp had been washed, and all the starch caught in the deerskin, the pulp that was left in the strainer cloth was thrown away.

The starchy water mix, that were captured in the deerskin was then left to ferment for several days. Then the starchy sediment was extracted from the water and taken to be lain out to dry, and once dry was ready to be used as flour.

Link

This is the Koonti flour Keith Tiger was telling Tobias MacIvey about in the Patrick Smith book, A Land Remembered.”

Giving this book one more plug, if you’ve not read it, I really believe there are very few out there who would not enjoy it. It is a very, very good book in my opinion!

Sofkee:

Well, we’d talked about sofkee just a little in the last column. We learned sofkee is ground corn and made into grits.
There’s another variation of it and this is made into hominy.

Instead of reading more on how to prepare this, and then trying to explain it to you, we had a surprise this morning. I had started this article and our good friend Bonnie had left this for us in a comment. How to make hominy! The Keith she is referring to is Keith Tiger, who we have just touched on above.

As for Keith’s Sofkee, we made what we called Hominy. It was whole grain corn, boiled in lye water till soft. Yep! We did this in the big iron wash pot. Then, for hominy, after the corn is soft enough, you rinse and rinse and rinse it some more, while rubbing the kernels to get the outer skin and the “germ” of the kernal off. The germ turns black while it is boiling in the lye water. After a good rinsing and cleaning, throw some in an iron skillet with some bacon drippings; good stuff!

Now, if you want to do it the REALLY old-fashioned way, you have to have an ash hopper for the ashes from your stove and fireplace. It is “V” shaped boards with one little “spout” coming out of the bottom. You sit a bucket under the spout, pour water through the ashes, and when it comes out it is lye water. If you really want to be sure it’s strong enough to make hominy corn, pour the water through twice. If that isn’t feasible in these modern days, just buy a can of Red Devil Lye!

I’ll bet Dale, living on a creek, has also had the pleasure of eating soft-shelled turtle! I like that braised with young green onions, though I haven’t had some for too long now!
Bonnie

Well, after visiting with Dale this morning, he said to tell you Bonnie, that yes, he does indeed take pleasure in eating this turtle. Honestly, I don’t think there’s too much Dale won’t eat, but coming from me, this is kinda’ like the pot calling the kettle black! I have no room to talk when speaking about someone’s eating habits!!

I hope you all enjoyed the subject matter of the last couple days, but I personally found most of this quite interesting!

I would like to say thanks once again to everyone that stopped in and visited with us today! You guys are great. Please take care, and God Bless you all!

Dub and Deb