Antonio Sanchez sketches a recipe for fried hummingbird sage (Salvia spathacea) in Eating CA! Using Edible Plants in Your Diet and Garden (2021): “take the bigger leaves and then… for about 20 to 30 seconds… fry them… turn them over a few times… then you can crack a little bit of salt a little bit of pepper on top…”
Working in a school garden today, someone took out a couple of hummingbird sage plants that were growing too close to the path. I saved these from going into the green bin, partly in order to try to resurrect the plants, but also with this recipe in mind… Back home, I cut off the bigger leaves (planting the remainder of the plants, including partial root, in a gallon pot) and put them in water to soak. They had wilted a bit on the walk home so soaking helped with crisping them up and changing the water a few times also served to do a first cleaning.
After they had soaked for a couple of hours, I took out each leaf and cleaned it carefully under running water. Since they’re resinous, it took some gentle prodding to get each bit of leaf matter or soil fully rinsed away.
Then I fried them, several at a time, in olive oil. Especially since they were a little damp from the cleaning/soaking, it was a splattering mess, but the end product was pretty tasty… I cooked them much longer than Sanchez suggested (2-3 minutes?), partly because I wanted to make sure nothing nasty would avoid the heat, which I’m guessing is why they lost most of their original nice strong smell… still I consider it a success, and hope to experiment with it again once my own patch of hummingbird sage gets going.
I missed getting a photo of the end product, but here’s a bowl of leaves waiting to be fried:
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