Yard to Plate: 100% Homegrown Meal in Orlando Suburbs

that's not looking like the typical Florida yard right there I think this place got a paid job since I was here last looks good I've got some fresh mulch looking good [Music] all right guys we got an exciting front yard dinner rob has invited me and Matt over for some dinner out of the garden everything obviously fright from the yard we're gonna kind of film the entire harvest process cooking process so hold tight are you ready yeah I'm ready what are we doing here what are we gonna eat it's been a long day I don't know we're gonna see what see what he's got for us we're eating something fresh from the yard over here everything from the yard so I think Rob's got something up his sleeve for a pretty epic dinner here tonight me and Matt are here - we're gonna help prepare we'll make Matt do some work I'm just gonna be filming hold tight I'm ready what's cooking all right today we're gonna have yuca pigeon pea and greens in Collard wraps first I'll take you over to the yuca tree I don't think they call them trees but this one's a big one so I planted these probably about a year ago so we'll see they could be little woody but there should be some definitely some good parts and they don't all get this big you've got back here this is you know a smaller one for example this gets less sunlight I'm sure and this is about as big as the trees get they're actually easier to harvest than you might think you don't have to dig them up dang oh oh just just that chunk alone Hey are you doing like cassava curls I mean how do you get all those muscles bro just even gardening and ride my bike looks good it doesn't look it doesn't look woody actually looks soft [Music] it's pretty easy like I'll show you basically you just take a nice chunk of the plant you would want to cut it to have cleaner sections and then if I'm gonna replant this you know ideally you don't plant things in the same spot over and over you pick a new spot of the yard but it's literally you stick it in the ground and that's gonna be a new cassava plant you can do it you know some people do it like this and they'll shoot up some people do it straight in some people do it at a 45 degree angle and all of these nodes each of these nodes will have either if it's Underground it'll have roots coming out of it and if it's above ground it'll have leaves growing out of it so you know this this is one of the easiest foods to grow huge amounts of in in Central Florida it's drought tolerant it really doesn't have pest problems and it's not the most nutrient dense plant but I don't need my nutrients to come from my cassava because they come in from my greens and things like that this is more this is the calories usually calories aren't super nutrient dense that's not the purpose they these are what fill you up and give you that energy and the nutrients will come from the other things in the garden so cassava is gonna be the base of our meal and then the other big one is the pigeon peas and this is another super-important easy to grow crop you know for people for beginners that don't really know how to garden cassava and pigeon peas two of the easiest ones again don't really know of any pests and this is put I planted this about a little over a year ago and I've already gotten three crops out of it probably and what I do is I wait you can hear this tree shaking a little bit though now this I've already harvested there's only a little bit left but what I do is I wait for almost the whole tree to be shaking like this so and then rather than having to pick one at times that's time-consuming instead what I do is I just wait for almost all three Brown and then I strip just like that and that way I can get that many in a handful so that saves me a lot of energy and I wait until I can grab it and all I have to do is squeeze it and it basically pops and you can eat them fresh but I I like to eat them dry because then I can store them and and so literally just with the two hands on the crease and if it pops open that could have popped a little more like it literally literally can actually pop and that's not quite popping so this could be a little drier but that's how I harvest pigeon peas and I already have pigeon peas soaking because it's nice to soak them for you know up to a day or even two days depending to make cooking time faster so I'm not gonna harvest this right now because I already have a harvested but you can see it's putting out nice flowers here so this will have another crop I've got a few pigeon pea trees around the yard and a few around the neighborhood what we're here is amaranth which we won't use as the grain I'm working for tonight we're not going to have this grain I'm working on harvesting this grain and actually having a meal that way but what we will harvest is some of the greens so I like to harvest the nice fresh young greens and I mean we call them greens but they're not green they're pretty purple so this is a red amaranth and I'm just gonna harvest the young tender leaves and this meal that we're making tonight is almost 100% from this front yard garden the the cassava the pigeon peas most of the greens but there's also going to be some herbs that I've maybe there for example my salt will have come from the ocean some of my herbs could come from some of my other Gardens some of them might have come from foraging as well not exactly sure of the concoction we're gonna make it I know the base but I always kind of figure things out as I go I have no recipes I've never written a recipe in my entire life and I've used very few recipes so definitely gonna figure out the meal as we go and yeah I've got a good idea I've done it plenty of times but we'll see what comes together and these amaranth that I'm harvesting right now all I did was take seed you can see the brown on there when it's brown that's ready so I'd wait till a lot longer but all I did was take seed from another garden where I had grown this and I just scattered it and you can see it growing everywhere this is another survival crop it's a self seeding annual that probably once you've got it it's probably hard to get rid of which is a good thing because it's greens and it's and it's the the grain as well so it's a really good you know in a lot of places it grows in a wheat as a weed all over the United States and it's a really good weed to have around pretty weed it's a beautiful enesta thing you can also make bouquets with this a lot of people use it as a decoration so this is an extremely multi purposed plant and I'm sure there's MIT things I'm missing beyond that of what you can do with it so I have an abundance of this right now this is the New Zealand spinach so we'll saute some of this up and yeah I mean for a lot of new new gardeners I think one thing that a lot of people they always feel bad some people feel bad picking from their plants like they're killing it and so like they have this feeling of scarcity but what I'm doing right now is actually gonna make me more food by picking here what this is gonna do is it's gonna actually when it grows back it's gonna branch out so I'm literally creating food by eating my food and and when you deal with perennials you know that's the way it is a lot of the time so it's about you know a mindset of abundance rather than a mindset of scarcity and you know if you get good at gardening you don't even have to be that good to all of a sudden be living a life of some serious abundance it's it's the most abundant way that I found to live average but they've been the cabbage heads of life and just putting out these great leaves and just huge and they make a great rap so these are what we're gonna use for our raps I'll use some of these cabbage and I'll use some of the collards I definitely like to throw some medicine into all my meals this is plant hago there's many different varieties of it but you can chew this up and use it as a poultice if I get stung by a bee I put it on there and it drastically prevents swelling but you can eat it as well and juice it and I throw it in meals I've got a nice flavor and yeah I always like to add some medicine to every meal [Music] whole bunch of the African blue basil I use this and in a lot of meals I mean this is one of these plants that just comes back forever and you can see all the bees like I said I don't have recipes or any actual plan when I start most of my meals I usually just have a huge number of herbs today is day 171 of going and foraging all my food so and all my gardens are young but I see my friends who have this and they have just giant you know it expands and the more years you do this stuff the more solid you get yeah I mean it becomes easier over time I'm still in the beginner stage I don't even know the proper way to harvest this stuff i mean i can assume you pull the outer leaves like most anything but so much to know [Music] here are the pigeon peas I've had these soaking for about 18 hours or so so they swell up but just you know and then it just drastically reduced his cooking time here's some stuff from the garden the the last of my beets and then most well actually I still have a whole bunch of carrots to pull up I pulled up 40 carrots these are the reject ones that I had put here to eat right away but I pulled up 40 pounds of carrots a couple days ago that's only a fraction of them so I did take some of your suggestions on YouTube I threw a few pigeon fees in there but only a few I I really have did it but anyway salt from the ocean and then I've just got so many things here that I've dried mostly from the garden what to do what to do well definitely some red peppers rice fewer those throw some dried green onion in there two cloves of garlic try to do a lot of meal prep so this is Seminole pumpkin carrot sweet potato soup with herbs in there and that way you know and I'm in a hurry I can just grab meals on the go when I don't feel loved you feel like making a meal this is my overflow region stuff that I'm working on processing so I've got some onions here from the garden so we have an onion some garlic still harvesting garlic but here's that you can see that this I think was already starting to sprout and left in the ground too long oh you know I'll grab some of this fresh cilantro to put on top more Oh some garlic scapes those we got some major flavor garlic scapes all right that'll do for now [Music] we've got cassava or yuca we've got pigeon peas this makes up the the calories this makes up the protein for the meal and then thrown in some carrots and some celery and then of course the base the wraps is going to be the collard greens or as Matt calls them the cabbage collards and then I'm gonna saute up a whole bunch of greens there's caught there's two different types of kale Swiss chard New Zealand spinach amaranth and then some medicine this is the the plantain or plant hago and for herbs I've got garlic chives African blue basil rosemary and then I've got a few dried herbs so this is almost a hundred percent from this garden we've got some herbs from my other garden and then some salt from the ocean otherwise so this is slightly foraged like maybe 1% forage and 99% from two gardens and almost almost like 95% of it's from this one front yard garden so a complete meal from the garden so I cut it in half and then you peel it and this is a very unique peel it's not like potatoes or anything like that and the way the peel is the peel on an ideal yuca the peel just literally kind of peels right off so I get my thumb in there and that's cuz I was doing well and things are going well just comes right off there we go whoo so there's the route so I'm just this is all we're gonna cook tonight there's no need to cook this whole thing oh I'll cook this tomorrow or I'm actually hopefully gonna turn it into flour for the first time I haven't had flour or bread for at least 171 days so that'll be awesome so this is good cassava then I'm feeling here cutting right through this a lot of times there's a woody Center but there's not it's not looking very woody there's not even really a core so sometimes when cassava gets really old it gets really woody but also I've harvested cassava that's that's pretty old and it's not an I harvested cassava that was young that was woody so I haven't found exact rhyme or reason to things so I've got boiling water I try to boil that ahead time and then I just put the de cassava into the boiling water and I they say you have to boil it for a minimum of 15 minutes cassava has cyanide in it so it is a toxic plant you absolutely cannot eat this raw the leaves or the root cannot be eaten raw but cooking it for 15 minutes or so it destroys that the cyanide compound I think it's a hydrogen cyanide anything and different cyanide plants have different levels of sorry sorry different cassava has different levels of that typically here in the United States we only grow the varieties that are lower in that whereas I've read in Africa they have the varieties that have a lot of it and that has to be fermented this doesn't have to be fermented but it's a good thing to ferment it I believe nutrients are more readily available if you do boiling it in salt water Oh changes it completely it's so much more tasty to boil it in salt water I [Music] always do lots of ingredients and my former partner Cheryl she was such a big fan of like less ingredients the simplicity of just a few ingredients and that's an art that I just have not mastered but it it can be amazing but then but I'm always just loading up and trying to make it as nutritious and you know nutritious as possible great we've got the pigeon peas going into the pot cause it is soaking for close to 24 hours and then throwing in the other ingredients we've got celery red peppers those are kind of mild not super hot carrots the garlic chives some green onion went in there garlic rosemary and African blue basil and sea salt as well so that's what's going into the pigeon peas well cassava is beyond ready so I'm going to take that off and I only have two burners so makes cooking a little hard sometimes if I'm doing something like this but here's the Greens also you'll see that I don't have the biggest pan so sometimes that's a little overloaded and I'm just gonna use some of this cassava water just saute the greens in no oil in this meal not so much by choice but just because I haven't been successful in making coconut oil yet otherwise we'd be using oil hopefully in one of the future videos you'll see that's cooking with oil and I'll be basking in it but not yet so we are gonna grab sauerkraut one of the most important ingredients for this meal was the Florida root cellar what do you got going on yeah this is in my little makeshift root cellar here where I put my ferments to keep them cooler it's not super cool in here but it's way cooler than in my house that doesn't have air conditioning or climate control today we'll go with this one this is cabbage and beet with garlic dill and onion the perfect garnish there are the greens they are done just lightly sauteed and then the pigeon peas dinner is served so we've got a little system here I'll show you this is a pretty typical for meal for me I make this I make these a lot color drops with whatever it might be on it so there is the cassava or the yuca throw some of that on there then I do a little bit of fresh greens just a bit of fresh greens then my sauteed greens and then pigeon peas and one of the most important thing is the sauerkraut or whatever it is that I'm fermenting at the time nice beautiful beet and cabbage sauerkraut and then I've also got some green onion raw to garnish it with and some basil and that right there is a yuca pigeon pea wrap Wow so I'm gonna make one for each of us and as you can see there's a lot of food here so I made enough to make 10 or 15 of these wraps typically I'll I'll make quite a few meals at once and the ideal scenario makes really this whole project just a lot more manageable to just be able to freeze this and have more meals [Music] he with the raps is duly not having too much water in there because then they drip on yeah that's a fat rap - that's also something I have a hard time with is not making my raps too fat we don't have three plates here I've got bowls though whoa serving balls typically and one Appetit sit down daddy all right all way that's a needed seat [Music] are you thinking here slow-mo ripening mm-hmm [Music] one of our major staple Wow sauerkraut makes it robbers nice enough to share this awesome bro [Music] thanks for joining us all for dinner it's been a lovely experience and if this video does well and you all really like this then Pete and I are planning on doing a whole series of cooking here in my outdoor kitchen of all the different foods that I throw in for it so let us know if you do like this in the comments and what food you want to see us cooking and eating and we'll try to do that for you also thanks for being here see y'all next time so I hope you all enjoyed this little cooking video with Rob Greenfield and you heard Rob if you guys enjoyed this you want to see more of this I think it would be epic to put a cooking series together with you know plants perennial vegetables foods that we grow down here in Florida that I talk about in these landscapes all the time it's like it's the finishing step you know we see how to grow them we see what they look like now you see how to cook them and you can kind of see a little result of what the finished product can be so let us know down below if you want these to keep coming don't forget if you guys enjoyed this video be sure to hit that like button if you haven't subscribed yet please subscribe be sure to pound that Bell to stay notified and most importantly pounder you