Post-Apocalyptic Salad

The green stuff in the picture is purslane. My Peterson Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants: Eastern and Central North America recommends chopping it up and adding it to salads. It’s not bad, but there wouldn’t be a major flavor or texture contrast, and it would take a lot of the stuff to bulk the salad up. Peterson also says you can grind flour from the seeds. Somebody must have tried it, maybe Roger Tory Peterson himself, but the flowers are tiny, so the seeds must be microscopic.

I’m going to seal-coat the driveway, so I’ve been cleaning the cracks in the asphalt. This was such a good specimen, I had to snap the picture. The book is about a quarter century old, so not up-to-date, but still true. I don't know whose the skull is. I found it in Illinois' oak-hickory woods.

There’s a Sufi story (and there are probably as many Sufi stories as there are rabbi stories) about a man who starved to death because it never occurred to him to eat his dog. We may be eating a lot of purslane soon (lamb’s quarters is another common alley green, and it’s supposed to be among the most nutritious). I’ve been eyeballing the squirrels, too.