eating weeds for breakfast?

At the beginning of the summer, I was able to have a nice, small patch of soil next to my patio to use as my wildflower and honeybee garden. And for my first flower garden, it turned out pretty darn beautiful! But like any garden, occasionally my flower garden gets riddled with pesky weeds.

However, I remembered reading an article a long time ago that some of these common weeds were actually edible! One of those edible weeds is a plant called purslane, portulaca oleracea. Apparently, not only was this weed edible, it was packed with omega-3s and other vitamins and minerals! So I weeded my flower garden and brought in a nice bundle of purslane to try in my breakfast.

After a quick google search, (and making sure that the weeds that I picked was definitely purslane and not its poisonous doppelganger) I found out that purslane was used similarly to how spinach and arugula are used. So I thought, why not add it to my regular kitchen sink omelette? After rinsing off the purslane and picking off the stalks into bite sized pieces I lightly sauteed them with a bit of chopped onions, mushrooms, and garlic.

I love making omelettes because it's so simple and a tasty vehicle to stuff with random veggies. And sometimes I like to think that beating the hell out of two eggs until they are light and frothy can substitute as my morning arm workout. Ha ha ha. I like adding a bit of sugar and a pinch of salt to my omelettes? Sugar in omelettes sounds a little off-putting but I really love how it tastes. 

Overall, I think that purslane tasted pretty damn good for something that would usually go into my compost pile. It has a very acidic aftertaste and tastes a lot better raw than sauteed. Even though I only sauteed the purslane for literally seven or eight seconds, they cooked really quickly and could get a tad bit slimy when overcooked. Next time, I'll just toss them in at the very last second after I'm done sauteing my veggies. Nonetheless, it was a very delicious omelette!

Hopefully I won't die or anything by eating weeds.

Anyway, continuing on the botanic theme, a week ago, I picked some flowers and other various foliage and pressed them between old sheets of newspaper. When they were all dried out and ready to use, I collected them in this old stamp tin that I thrifted a while ago for a measly fifty cents.

I don't know most of the names of the flowers except for queen anne's lace which is the delicate white flower at the bottom left corner.

There was also this leaf that I pressed that had a fuzzy underside! I thought it was very cute.

And I really liked how translucent this leaf turned out to be. 

If anyone knows the name of any of these plants it'd be really cool if you could let me know!