It's Chickweed Time! 4 Recipes + Potential Use in Interstitial Cystitis
It is officially spring and among the many plants popping up in my garden, I've got a glorious patch of chickweek (Stellaria media). I'll bet you have some too around your yard or neighborhood. Here's what it looks like.
Naturally, I felt called to consume it in some way, so I tried out several recipes; 2 smoothies, a quesadilla, fresh tea, and cooked as a green vegetable.
Besides the fact that chickweed is a wild edible, it also has medicinal properties, including traditional use for Interstitial Cystitis (IC). While there isn't a lot of modern research to support its use specifically for IC, several well respected herbalists (David Winston, Kat Maier, and Susun Weed) list it for this use based on traditional literature and clinical experience.
My experience of consuming it as both a tea, and as food, is that it has a slippery, mucilaginous quality. One of the properties of mucilage is that it has an anti-inflammatory effect on tissue that it comes in contact with, and chickweed is well known to support healing of skin wounds topically. It is easy to imagine then, that chickweed could indeed support healing of the gut and bladder mucosa as it comes in contact with these tissues internally. Chickweed is also known to contains saponins, which are constituents found in plants that are known to have anti-inflammatory activity.
Additionally, there is one animal study which showed that chickweed reduced inflammation when given orally to rats whose paws had been stimulated to be inflamed.
Now for the recipes!
RECIPES
Strawberry, Banana, Chickweed Smoothie
Ingredients:
3-4 frozen banana chunks
1/2 cup strawberries (preferably frozen)
1 handful of fresh chickweed
1/2-1 cup milk (or milk alternative, such as almond, rice, oat, hemp, etc)
Blend together in a standard or bullet blender.
The smoothie was pretty good, but my daughter and I were not happy with the fact that the chickweed turned the color brown. The strawberries we used were not frozen, so that might have contributed as well. More experimentation needed on this one.
Orange, Cherry, Banana, Chickweed Smoothie
Ingredients:
3 frozen banana chunks
1/2 fresh peeled orange
6 frozen dark red cherries
1 handful of fresh chickweed