Harvesting Broccoli Leaves

About a week ago, I harvested some zucchini, tomatoes, Japanese eggplant, snipped a few broccoli leaves and made a great stir fry. Broccoli leaves taste pretty good and can hold their own in the heat of the pan. This past Thursday I carefully removed almost all the broccoli at the base of the plant. I didn’t want to rip out the roots, so I just cut under the dirt. A few roots were pulled up, but for the most part I was able to keep them in the ground. Anyway, I was pretty excited to bring all these broccoli plants inside to be washed, snipped and laid out to dry. That is…until I started to inspect each plant a little more carefully. I don’t know what I expected! Did I have a silent expectation that every leaf was going to be pristine, unchewed and uninhabited by other little creatures? Yeah, okay, I saw a few holes in some of the leaves, but nothing major…right?

Uhh?! Right! Nope, that wasn’t the case. I thought to my self, “The really chewed ones I’ll just put into the compost…no biggie”, BUT as I began to snip each leaf, I found a multitude of MOTH EGGS! It was like egg city. I thought I was okay washing all the leaves off, picking the best ones, and laying them out to wilt. Of all the broccoli plants I had, there were only a handful of very nice leaves.

Because of the infestation of moth eggs on the rest of the plant, I decided not to even put it into the compost pile. I don’t have a hot pile going right now, so the only thing that would end up happening in our massive compost worm pile, is the eggs hatching, they eat ALL the broccoli, turn into butterflies and eat more of my cabbage. No thank you! Into the garbage it went.

So these broccoli leaves are laying on my counter over night, and each time I come into the kitchen, all I could think about is the massive amounts of eggs I had to wash off the plant. My stomach started to turn. To me it would be like eating something that was maggot infested. Needless to say, I was perturbed by it all.

<——-Do you see ALL the eggs? Some leaves were more riddled with moth eggs than others, but they all had them. That’s all I could think about…moth eggs on my food. Yes I washed them off, and even cleaned them with a very mild soap, (okay I scrubbed them) but I definitely created a mental block around eating these broccoli leaves now! I was so totally grossed out, yet I STILL laid out the leaves to dry and wilt.

As I said earlier, I’d com into the kitchen and look at the broccoli leaves and my stomach would turn. Last night I couldn’t take it any more and I decided to throw them away. Yup, my mental block won this round.

I’ve eaten leaves of lettuce and other veggies that had a few nibbles taken from it, and I really had no problem with that. The moth eggs I DO have a problem with. Maybe someday the mental block will be removed, but as of now, I will not eat anything that was previously infested with bug eggs.