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heirloomgal
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I went looking for poppy seeds to make lemon poppy seed cake a few days ago, a dessert I haven't bought seeds for in over 15 years. I don't know if the poppy seeds I have from the garden are safe, or the same as what I used to buy from the store years ago. I couldn't find anything. I asked and they said they haven't had them since the Afghan trouble a ways back. He then told me years ago he bought a wreath from craft store White Rose and shook out the seeds from the dried poppy heads on it, and planted them in his garden. He saw that the tag said made in Afghanistan. He said the flowers were a beautiful mix of pinks, purples and reds. That fall he made lemon poppy seed muffins, a dozen of them, and used the seeds from those poppies. He ate the first two and on the 3rd, sailed into the ether. That seemed odd to me, I've eaten lemon poppy seed cake countless times without strangeness. I asked him, how much did you put in? 'Only a cup' he says.I did a double run to BOTH H-marts near me in an attempt to secure more of the wild mung beans and such while I could. The first trip was not initially part of the plan, but I could not find the empty bag I had put to the side from the last one for its expiration date (which would tell me which batch NOT to buy), so I had to go back to my "normal" one and double check the date. This actually proved to be somewhat advantageous, as, while check ALL of the bags, I noticed an "old" one I had missed last time (plus, I managed to scare up two package of frozen Chinese buns of the one frozen brand I actually find to be somewhat decent, and confirmed the new bottled ice tea I have become fond of is in fact being restocked for the moment.)
Between the two of them, I walked away with four bags to test. And while, regrettably, none of them proved to be the "correct" ones (it looks like the company must update the expiration date and switch batches quite often, as I found two bags with dates separated by only a week or two [ and remember, this is a dried, not very perishable product, so updating the date so often would not actually be all that necessary.]) I did not wind up TOTALLY empty handed, there were a smattering of bindweed seeds of various species (there pretty much always are, regardless of what else does or does not show up) and a few commoner domestic seeds (regular mung bean, regular rice bean).
The only odd thing was the presence of a lentil in one bag and of a LOT of guar seeds in two others (same batch). The bags say the senna is grown in China, and neither of these are crops I associate with there. Maybe where they are grown borders China AND India (or maybe they're growing it just for export or processing purposes, like how the chickpeas probably would up in the Korean "Healthy Bean Mix."
![Face with rolling eyes :rolling_eyes: 🙄](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f644.png)
It does make me wonder though, can any poppy seed be used in baking?
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