Bah, craisins--try rose hips instead.

This weekend the Student Environmental Association went to Waterloo State Park for a cabin outing.

I like to point out that rose hips are edible, are high in vitamin C, and as such can help a fellow in preventing scurvy. As you may suspect, Michigan's largest state park in the lower peninsula has rose bushes (possibly wild) in its area, and I pointed them out to Duke and Amit.

However, I never ate the rose hips. Maybe in the past I tried some in the backyard from domestic roses and didn't fancy their flavor when I was younger. More likely it's because there's a bottle of Ester-C made from rose hips and other stuff in the medicine cabinet, and each pill has a horrible hay fiber texture with an unpleasantly semi sweet/sour medicine cabinet taste if you don't swallow them soon. That said, I don't take vitamin C pills frequently.

Anyhow, Amit and Duke were fascinated and decided to try it out despite my disclaimers and warnings (good for them!). Better still, they really enjoyed them and started eating all the ripe hips off of the bushes.

I finally decided to try them and realized they were indeed pleasant, like dry craisins (minus the coloring and high fructose corn syrup) with a hint of rose in the aftertaste. Mind you, this is early mid-winter in Michigan, so the hips were dehydrated, but they were certainly delicious.

I'd like to experiment with the native wild roses on the Estate grounds at UM-Dearborn next to see if they bear a similar taste.