Anyone pick POKE ??

[mmtillman]

We forage here....every season has an edible for us to look forward to finding!! POKE season is NOW!! Anyone here wanna tell me your poke experience? How to find it , how to cook it and what to eat it with?
We boil ours 2x then fry it with a tad of bacon grease for flavor with olive oil, onions, and eat it with brown beans , fried potatoes and cole slaw!!! YUM!! Then we go back and pick a pickup load to freeze and have all winter each time we have beans!! It is a lot of work to fix it but well worth allllll the effort!!!

 

[me&thegals]

Nope. What zone are you in? What is poke? Can you post a picture?

 

[mmtillman]

OK...POKE is a green...a wild green that people around here pick....old timers mostly. They are the plants that poke berries come from?? Those purple berries the indians used to make dye thousands of years ago??

Well, POKE is actually poisonous ? ...in a way...the berries are and the young tender plants have to boiled 2x and drained in order to eat it...sounds complicated, I know. But I learned all this from my Inlaws ..they were hillbillys....LOL

OK...you first have to learn how to ID POKE. It looks like any other weed that grows in the spring and you dont wanna get the wrong thing.....It took me a couple of years to learn how to know it for sure. Get an oldtimer to teach you how to ID it if you can.
Hubby taught me, as well as his dad and family.
So you pick the young tender shoots that grow out of the middle of the plant. They have to be young plants tho. You be sure and shake the bugs or leaves out of them , then put them in a bag.

Then you bring it home and wash in the sink or a large tub. Then you put the leaves in a big kettle and boil it for about 30 min. Then you pour off that water and boil it again , adding salt this time. Poke stinks as you cook it. You have to ignore that fact.

Then you drain it and cook it like spinach with bacon grease and onions. Serve it with brown beans and fried potatoes...YUM! We pick enough that I can freeze like 30 packages of it and each time we have brown beans all year long , we have POKE with them!! LOts of people eat poke around here.....It is about time to go pick some now in fact!! Then after poke season is over we have wild berry season to look forward to !! Then we have the fall squirrel season after that and the fall mushrooms.
Hey....I AM a hillbilly too, arent I ?? LOLOLOLOLOLOL !!
And to think I was born and raised in KCMO!! LOL!