A Perennial Food Experiment: Stuffed Milkweed Pods

Last week I was off on a camping vacation that you’ll likely hear more about in a future blog post. However, just before leaving I engaged in a culinary experiment I wanted to share with you. I didn’t have time to write up the results before my travels so it waited until now. The experiment is stuffed milkweed pods.

(Please note some of the links in this blog post are affiliate links. What this means is that should you click through them and make a qualifying purchase I will receive a commission which I’d certainly appreciate since it helps support this blog project. However, this shouldn’t increase your cost any, and certainly don’t ever feel like I’m pressuring you to buy things through the links I offer or anywhere else. I’m all about being frugal first!)

I fear this is not great timing for a couple reasons. One, the season to gather immature milkweeds pods is probably past for any of you reading this who might want to go out and try your own versions, so this is kinda like tantalizing you and then making you wait almost a full year. Still my hope is that the articles on the blog will get read by many over the years at various times so hopefully some reading this can go right out and try. I didn’t want to wait another year to write this.

The other reason this is not great timing isn’t likely to affect you. I’m currently trying to do a 3 day water fast, where I consume nothing but water. For most the goal of this sort of activity is weight loss. While I’m sure I put on a few pounds during my camping trip due to an excess consumption of what my camping buddy and I jokingly call “vitamin M”, and other related food-like substances, weight loss is not really my goal as I’m happy enough with my weight. My goal is to use this fast to help reset my gut microbiome, and reset my taste buds which have been inundated with all that sugar, fat, and salt from the “vitamin M” and assorted other junk food. (If you haven’t figured out what “vitamin M” is yet see the image below for the best flavor in my opinion.)

Anyway, right now it’s the evening of day 3 of my water fast, so I’m kinda torturing myself by sitting down to write about food when I’m really quite hungry, but not planning to eat until tomorrow morning. So this makes it bad timing for me to do this post. Still, I want to get a post written for you all and now is the time I’m going to do it!

So in an earlier post I wrote about some of my food goals, one of those being a search for ways to develop a personal food culture utilizing whole food plant based things that were also wild growing edibles. One awesome plant to fit this is common milkweed which I first explored here in this post about excellent perennial vegetables. I wanted to try stuffed milkweed pods back then, but the milkweed was still in the bud and flower stage.

As it moved into the immature pod stage I used plenty simply diced up in other dishes, but never quite got the time to play in the kitchen doing stuffed pods. So here it is at last.

As mentioned you want to use immature pods, ones that are 3/4 or less what their full size usually is. At this stage they will still be actively growing and thus tender enough for good eating. I’m sure there a lots of options for what to use when making a stuffing mix, but at harvest time I also happened to have lots of tomatoes coming ripe, needing to be used, and plenty of recently harvested garlic. So I opted to utilize these.

Since I was using garlic I first pealed, crushed, and chopped that up so it could have time to sit while I prepared the rest of the vegetables. Apparently if you crush raw garlic and let it sit for about 10 minutes before cooking, an enzyme reaction takes place helping to preserve some of the added health benefits of raw garlic. Dr. Greger talks about this some in this video on his free Nutrition Facts website.

Let me back up just a bit, I also used a black rice and lentils in the stuffing mix, so I’m pretty sure I got those cooking together in a pot first so they could simmer until fully cooked while I prepared all the vegetables. (I believe I warned you in the past that my “recipes” would be vague and not follow any standard format.)

After the garlic, I diced up a big pile of the tomatoes. I seem to have gotten into the cooking a bit too much and forgot to keep taking photos. As I recall I believe I used some fresh oregano from the yard as well as some fresh basil and cilantro I got at the farmers market. They may well have been a diced onion thrown in the mix.

As for the milkweed pods you could just dice them up and use them like any other vegetable, but to me they are just screaming out to be split, have the whites removed, and get stuffed. So I tried to pick ones that were on the larger side of edible, roughly 3/4 the size they would grow to. Often when picking the pods keep a tough little knob at the base which you can see in the photo below.

I like to break or cut this knob off. I don’t know if it’s really necessary or not, but it’s something I do. I think of it sort of like removing the ends of snow peas or green beans.

Next the pods are pretty cool in that they have a natural seam along one side where they just want to split open on. So that’s what I do, simply grab the pod to either side of this seam and pull it open. Inside are a bundle of immature seeds and what will become the ubiquitous milkweed fluff. This is generally referred to as the “whites”. It’s fully edible at this immature stage as well. (Oh, I should note here that you do want to cook all your milkweed rather than eating it raw. This deactivates some compound that I understand can be irritating to some.) I saved the whites to chop up and add into the stuffing mix.

As I think about this I believe I lied earlier when I said I started the rice and lentils cooking while I chopped all the vegetables. This is what I normally do when using rice and/or lentils. However, in this case I had a huge pile of tomatoes to cook down so I’m pretty sure I put them into the pot with the rice and lentils to all cook together with a bit of salt. My thinking was that the extra water in the tomatoes I wanted to boil out would get used to cook the rice. This seemed to work out just fine. Then later in my cast iron frying pan I cooked up the chopped whites, garlic, herbs, and onion, adding in the tomato/rice/lentil mix to cook all together in the pan. If memory serves me I had way more of the tomato rice mix than I needed for the pods I had prepared so I only used part of it in the pan with the other stuff. The remainder was eaten later on its own.

So I had the stuffing mix fully cooked, while the split pods were still raw. I then grabbed a spoon and stuffed all the pods, laying them out into a baking pan. Then I just tossed the pan, uncovered into the oven to bake for maybe 30 minutes at about 425 degrees F.

I think I was getting quite hungry by that time and figured that since the filling was fully cooked they didn’t really need to bake that long to cook the pods themselves enough to eat. Anyway, I pulled them out thinking they looked fairly decorative, like a good hor d’oeurve for a party or potluck. Then I put a bunch on a plate and dug in…

… and they weren’t that good. The filling tasted good to me, but the pods themselves were very tough. I couldn’t cut them with a fork, or bite them in half with my teeth. I could stuff the whole thing in my mouth and chew it up but this wasn’t quite satisfying. At this point it was rather late and I’d had enough playing in the kitchen so my dinner consisted of the filling and more of the extra filling from the pan.

The next day I thought about this more and decided on a couple different things to try. Maybe I had to cook the pods in the pan longer. Would that make them crispy or maybe more tender instead? I also recalled my home economics classes in high school and the concept of a moist heat cooking method. That’s probably what would help out here. So I got another small oven safe dish, put a layer of the extra filling in the bottom, then laid a few stuffed pods on top, and covered it with aluminum foil. This way it should maintain moisture while baking. Both the pan and covered dish were then put back in the oven to bake longer, maybe another 30 to 45 minutes.

The results of these two efforts were successful on both counts. The open pan baking technique seemed to make the narrow points and edges of the milkweed pods crispier to where I could bite them off, while the inner sections filled with the mix had softened to where it was tender enough to cut with a fork or bite in half. So I just needed more cooking time for that approach. However, I think the greater success was the covered dish utilizing the moist heat cooking method. This resulted in a much more tender pod, and it’s what I’m likely to do the next time I make these.

As I mentioned I’m sure there are plenty of other versions of filling one could use. The pods themselves are fairly neutral in flavor. They just need to be cooked enough and in such a way as to be tender.

So tomorrow the plan is to end my 3 day water fast and start eating food again. I’m very much looking forward to that! In the past I shared a healthy cure for a sweet tooth. One of the things I plan to do tomorrow is make up another tasty recipe which is also a decadent sweet that is fully healthy. I’ll be sure to take some photos and it will probably become the next blog post.

Studio Snippet

Lately my studio work has been exclusively chasing on the dog commission I shared before. It’s coming along now, though it took me a while to get back into the groove of this sort of chasing. I’ve done representational image work in the past, but it’s been quite a while. The thinking process while chasing is quite different from how I normally work. Usually I see a drawn line as a separation of two planes, one higher and one lower. In this representational type work many of my original lines are just reference points. In the chasing itself there may not be distinct lines, just minor undulations of form. It’s a whole different way of working for me.

I’m happy to have a site where I can again allow comments. (I had to shut them off on my main website because the spam was simply uncontrollable!) So please I encourage you to share thoughts of your own. My general rule about comments though is just to play nice. Differing views are fine, but I’m not interested in engaging in or moderating verbal fights. If I feel things get out of hand, by whatever criteria I decide, I’ll just start blocking or deleting things.