Category Archives: weeds

Purslane Salad

THE BEST THINGS in life are free—and easy. Take this weed salad that uses purslane as the featured ingredient. It’s delicious in inverse proportion to the time and skill required to make it. Which is to say it’s really good and really simple.

 

First, a word about weeds. Most gardeners  are busy pulling purslane (Portulaca oleracea)l—and pulling their hair out, too, because like Himalayan blackberry purslane can never be vanquished. But it can be eaten. 

Here’s what you do. Pick a bunch of purslane, stem it (making sure to keep many of the leaf clusters intact), and toss it with a chopped sweet onion such as a Walla Walla and a large ripe heirloom tomato. That’s it. Season with salt and pepper and allow the tomato juice to form the dressing; squeeze a chunk of tomato into the salad if necessary to get the juices flowing.

You’ll be amazed by the results. Purslane has a crunchy texture and a complex flavor that marries perfectly with the acidic tomato juice and sweetness of the onion. Jon Rowley turned me onto this salad last summer at an oyster fest and we ate it again the other day when I dropped by his house to pilfer a few of the shoots for my own garden. 
 
That’s right, I’m planting weeds!

Dandelion Jelly

DANDY JELLY? The flavor is really quite wonderful. It’s kind of like a gelified honey, and gives one a better idea of why those bumblebees look so drunk and happy while buzzing through a field of dandelions. 

Here’s the recipe, with the caveat that your mileage may vary. Don’t forget: pectin is your friend when it comes to Dandelion Jelly.

2 cups dandelion petals
2 cups water
1 cup sugar
2 tsp lemon juice
2-4 tsp pectin*

* Maybe more, maybe less. This jelly operates on principles beyond our ken.

1. Bring 2 cups water to boil and add dandelions. Boil 10 minutes over medium heat.
2. Strain dandelions and return liquid to pot.
3. Add sugar, lemon, and pectin, then bring to boil again before reducing heat to a simmer. Stir with wooden spoon until syrupy. This may take little time or lots of time, depending.
4. Pour into sterilized jars, seal, and process in hot water bath for 10 minutes.

Yields about a pint.

A Dandy Day in the Neighborhood

This post is featured in Volume 7 of the Good Life Report. Subscribe here.

Ray Bradbury famously waxed nostalgic about his family’s love of dandelion wine. The story first appeared in Gourmet magazine and conjured a mostly lost bucolic America where everyone owned a wine press and the hated weed of today was thought of in much gentler terms. Bottled sunshine he called the tonic they made in the cellar. Even though dandelions are predominantly harvested in spring, the writing evokes thoughts of endless summer days, backyard baseball games, and kids with fishing poles riding bikes down to the local pond—the sort of stuff our current crop of post-structuralists might call a simulacra.

Sometimes I think I caught the tail end of that America in my own childhood, when there were still woodlots to roam near my family’s home and fireflies lit up the nighttime sky. Now most of us live in planned communities or the city. It’s paved. It’s crowded. But there are still plenty of dandelions.

The other day I went looking for six cups worth of the jaunty yellow petals in order to make wine. I started in my own tiny backyard, picking every one in sight. Then the front yard and down the block. Soon I was in front of the local elementary school, where last year I struck a bonanza of dandies, but a groundskeeper had already beat me to it with his John Deere. I continued on toward busy Rainier Avenue, once the gathering arterial for Italian immigrants in Seattle. They called the Rainier Valley “Garlic Gulch” back then. Now, after several successions, it’s largely Southeast Asian.

I walked through the community garden and found some beautiful bloomers. A middle-aged Laotian woman tilling her plot wanted to know what I was up to. I explained the culinary and medicinal benefits of Taraxacum officinale, how it’s much more nutritious than virtually anything we can grow ourselves, and she pointed me toward a burned-out husk of a house down the block. She told me an involved story about the fire and how her people wanted to help the owner rebuild but instead he was sitting on his hands. “He lazy but he good man,” she said. “I tell him you pick there.” This seemed like a legitimate enough invitation to me.

Indeed it was a dandy heaven. When not molested by the mower, dandelions grow tall and robust, angling their Cheshire Cat grins toward the solar life-force. I picked the front and then slipped around back, which is where Dandelion Nirvana truly opened up before me. There was an abandoned car and a loud autobody shop on the other side of the fence. A black cat prowled a hedgerow. This yard hadn’t been attended to in years! It was a sea of warm, inviting yellow.

I must have lost myself in the picking, because when I looked up I saw an old man sitting on the back stoop pulling a Budweiser out of a paper bag. It was 11 in the morning, and I decided this was a fairly valid maneuver on such an unseasonably hot April day. I picked my way over to him. He offered me the other can of beer in the bag, which I accepted.

“You police?”

No, I assured him, I was not. He was Laotian, too. His name was In Keow and he was 69 years old. Though the language barrier between us was tough, we persevered. His grandfather had once owned this home, he said. Next door lived a Vietnamese man. He said he was retired, that he had worked very hard, and that he would still work—but only for cash, no check. He was adamant about this last point. We sipped our beers in the hot morning sun.

In Keow was amused by my stoop labor in the dandelion patch. He had social security arriving once a month and some other unspecified payouts. Making wine—and spending hours plucking little dandelion petals to do it—was definitely not on his agenda. “I go to store,”he said proudly. “I buy beer.” As for me, I wasn’t about to argue with that logic. Springtime in America has never quite been what they say it used to be.

To make a simple Dandelion Wine, I followed the instructions of Pattie Vargas and Rich Gulling in Making Wild Wines & Meads. Combine 6 cups dandelion petals, 1 lb raisins, 2 lbs sugar, 1 tbsp acid blend, and 1 gallon boiling water into sanitized bucket. A day later mix a starter culture of 1 1/2 cups orange juice, 1 tsp yeast nutrient, and 1 package wine yeast in a jar, shake it up, and let it sit until bubbly, one to three hours. Pour starter culture into the vat along with 1 tsp pectic enzyme and loosely cover. Rack after three days into air-locked container, then rack again three months later and bottle. Wait another six months—until the depths of gloomy winter—to enjoy a taste of bottled sunshine.

Salad Days

The salad days are here again. Now is the time to take advantage of all the fresh new growth bursting with the sun’s energy. If you’re in California, the salad days have been on for a while; in the Great Lakes region you’re just off the block. Wherever you are, enjoy those early greens. They were important—sometimes life-saving—for our ancestors and should be just as revered by modern Homo sapiens.

Want to commit a radical act? Step outside your back door and pick some weeds for the table. That’s a metaphorical rock through the window of Big Ag and a first step toward putting our hopelessly effed-up food system on notice. As I’ve mentioned in numerous posts, many of the weeds we spend countless hours and dollars trying to eradicate are actually more nutritious than the stuff we grow on purpose. Think wild, think local, think seasonal. Think for yourself. You don’t need some massive head of corporate-sanctioned lettuce from the supermarket to get your greens on.

Today’s salad includes a mesclun-like mix of tender young greens: Dandelion, cat’s-ear, chickweed, and bittercress. The rest is miner’s lettuce, a native plant in my region. All are tasty and nutritious.

Pineapple Weed Express

IN ANOTER LIFETIME I might have been a treasure seeker. 

Like some of the great explorers of yesterday, I went in search of the lowly pineapple weed (Matricaria discoidea). You’ve probably never noticed it before. It grows low to the ground, usually just a few inches tall, sometimes more than a foot in good conditions, with feathery leaves reminiscent of a carrot top and little greenish-yellow flowerheads.

Like the sunflower, it is a composite, a member of the Asteraceae family, and is related to chamomile. Pineapple weeds flourish in marginal habitats: compacted soil, sidewalks, gravel beds, old lots. Their tap roots cling to the most hardscrabble of surfaces. Crush a flowerhead between your fingers and you’ll know right away if your identification is correct. A distinct smell of pineapple. 

My journey took me past homes and businesses to a gravelly lot at the bottom of a hill. Bingo.

Back home, it didn’t take long to dry the flowerheads in the hot June sun. I spread them on a black plate outside our front door. An hour later I scooped up two teaspoon’s worth and steeped them in two cups of hot water for 10 minutes. Then I added a touch of honey and ice, sat back in the rocking chair on the front porch, and remembered my days as an intrepid explorer while afternoon commuters fought their way home in the baking sun.

Dandy Tempura


In case you haven’t noticed, dandelions have bigger brains than people. Seriously. And they get smarter each time you whack them. Mow a lawn of dandelions repeatedly and what happens? The dandelions learn to flower ever closer to the ground until those yellow Cheshire cat faces are grinning at you from beneath the grass. They know exactly how far down the cutting blade can reach, and that’s where they proliferate once again.

The other day, after harvesting a few batches of dandelion petals for Dandy Bread, I actually mowed my lawn, surprising myself even more than my neighbors. It’s been a week and the yard is already replenished with dandelions. No biggie. I picked a bunch of blooms for tempura.

Got a problem with tempura? I didn’t think so. Here at FOTL we may periodically throw a tizzy about health and nutrition and generally staving off rot, but you won’t hear a lot of griping about FAT. It’s the stuff for which our ancestors put their lives on the line. Need some fat to survive the winter? Roger that, let’s tool up and take down one of them #$*%&@ woolly mammoths again. Tucking into a bag of pork rinds doesn’t carry quite the same cachet.

Yeah but making you own tempura and making it well is almost as cool as hurling a prehistoric projectile at an oversized elephant having a bad hair day. And while I’ve tried a bunch of tempura recipes over the years with wildly varying results, this time I think I figured out the secret. Whatever you do, make it more watery than you deem appropriate. I used a recipe found here, then tweaked it.

3/4 cup flour
1/4 cup corn starch
1/2 cup ice-cold water, plus extra
1 tbsp rice wine
1 egg

In a bowl mix the flour and corn starch. In a second larger bowl, beat an egg until frothy, then add the ice water and beat some more. Stir in the rice wine. Now add the dry ingredients and mix quickly, not worrying about the lumps. Don’t over-mix! If the batter oozes off a spoon, it’s too thick. Add more ice water until the batter is watery. It’ll seem way too watery if you’re used to making, say, Beer-Batter Fish and Chips, but trust me.

Now proceed over to the stove with your bowl o’ batter and a plate of dandy flowerheads. Your vegetable oil should be good and hot by now. Flick in a drop of water to see if it pops and sizzles. Using your hands, dip a dandy in the seemingly too thin gruel. The batter will run off the dandy in sheets but the flower will still be thinly coated and looking rather sad and soggy. Gently drop the dandy into the oil, petals facing down, and PRESTO! The flower opens up as if the sun has just come out. (This miracle of kitchen chemistry won’t happen if the batter is too thick and heavy.) It’s really quite amazing to see the dandy regain its form, albeit with a beautifully thin veneer of crispy tempura as its new skin.

Dandy Tempura has an unusual mouth feel. If the batter is right, the outer crust should be crispy, yet being a flower, the overall texture is squishy. I mix the dandies in with other more traditional fare: sweet potato, bell pepper, onion, and zucchini, to name a few.

Now go pick a mess of ridiculously nutritious dandelions and start frying. That’ll teach those PhD weeds!

Chickweed Chimichurri

SOUNDS LIKE AN Arizona ghost town. In fact, Chickweed Chimichuri is a zesty sauce.

Chimichurri hails from Argentina, where it was invented by an Irishman named Jimmy McCurry fighting for Argentinean independence in the 19th century. The sauce’s name is reputedly a bastardization of his name. Anyway, the traditional way to prepare it is with parsley, vinegar, garlic, oil, and hot pepper.

Here chickweed replaces the parsley and lemon juice replaces the vinegar.

Tuna with Chickweed Chimichurri

Chimichurri

1 packed cup chickweed, chopped
4-5 cloves garlic, minced
2 tbsp shallot, fine dice
3 tbsp sweet red pepper, fine dice
1 tbsp hot pepper, de-seeded, fine dice
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 tsp salt

Tuna and Sushi Rice

1 lb sushi-grade tuna, cut into small (1/2 inch) cubes
2 cups sushi rice
rice vinegar to taste

Makes 4 servings.

Mix chimichurri ingredients together in a bowl and refrigerate for an hour or so. Meanwhile make seasoned (i.e. add rice vinegar) sushi rice and cut up a bunch of sushi-grade tuna. Serve a dollop of the raw tuna over a bowl of rice; garnish with the chimichurri. The acidity of the chimichurri immediately begins to act on the tuna, changing the flavor in subtle ways as you eat.

Now, about the taste. A dish like this would seem to cry out for cilantro, but please resist. We all know what that tastes like. The greens in this case are far removed from parsley, cilantro, and other standard ceviche offerings. In a word, they’re wild. The bright green flavor, somewhat tempered by the other ingredients, gives this Tuna Poke a new twist. Enjoy it on its own merits or as a change of pace, preferably outside on a sunny day with a bottle of rosé wine.

 

Eat Your Yard


Urban foragers need not worry about pesticides, herbicides, and other nasty contaminants if they simply harvest the bounty of their own yards—provided, of course, they themselves don’t apply such nasty contaminants. Today’s salad consists of bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta), cat’s-ear (Hypochaeris radicata), and dandelions (Taraxacum officinale), all picked in a matter of minutes just a few feet from the back door. Oh, and a few salmonberry blossoms to make it purty.

Sure, I could have gone to the hippie mart and picked up some expensive organic greens with French-sounding names. But why burn oil and greenbacks when I can get an equally delicious salad with far greater nutritional value for free right in my own backyard?

Cat’s-ear should be familiar to those of you who don’t insist on a grassy lawn (and probably those who do, much to their chagrin)—it’s the indestructible weed with a seemingly mile-deep taproot that looks a lot like a dandelion but shoots up a thin stalk with a less robust yellow flowerhead. The leaves are dandelion-like except for a profusion of tiny hairs. And it’s quite the succubus, sucking the surrounding lawn dry of water and nutrients. Cat’s-ear is just as nutritious as dandelions, less bitter, and has a longer season. You can harvest leaves in winter in our climate.

Bittercress is another common weed, with many different varieties at the species level. I’m pretty sure ours is Cardamine hirsuta, a European invader. The common name is a misnomer, however, that dates back to Linnaeus. Bittercress is hardly bitter—it’s crunchy and sweet, making it an excellent addition to salads.

Dandelions I’ve already covered in previous posts.

Now one thing: I don’t want to oversell this here salad. Wild greens, like meat, are gamier than what you’re probably used to. The flavor is delicious to some, a little peculiar to others. Try mixing in a few wild plants with a regular domestic green salad you’re first time out of the chute, then work up to an all-wild salad. This isn’t meant to be some sort of exercise in penance.

To my readers in the Puget Sound region, I highly recommend the 2nd edition of Arthur Lee Jacobson’s Wild Plants of Greater Seattle (although it’s most useful if you have some basic plant knowledge). For the rest of you, a little surfing around the web should help you locate similar guides with a regional emphasis. For the last several years I’ve been trying to improve my botanical skills. The best approach is to learn the families and genera; identifying plants to a species level can be quite difficult, and nearly impossible with field guides that cover the entire continent. You’re much better off studying the basics and then working with a local guide.

If you really want to go crazy in the PNW plant kingdom, pick up the bible: Hitchcock & Cronquist, a cool $60 ($48 at the ‘zon); this is the key to pretty much everything that grows around here, but you need to know your taxonomy.

Happy botanizing!

Wilted Dandy Salad

I’M USUALLY not a big fan of warm salads. But there’s one warm salad I’ve been making for years, thanks our friend Kathy.

Kathy’s Wilted Salad

6 cups dandelion greens (or spinach)
2 cups basil leaves
3-4 oz prosciutto, diced
1/2 cup pine nuts
3-4 cloves garlic, minced
3/4 cup parmesan cheese, grated
1/4 cup olive oil
salt and pepper, to taste

Mix the greens in a large salad bowl. Heat olive oil in skillet over medium heat. Add pinenuts and garlic, stirring occasionally. When pinenuts start to brown, add prosciutto and cook one more minute. Pour contents of skillet over salad greens and toss with parm. Season if necessary.

Braised Dandelion Greens

Halibut with Braised GreensIN LIKE A LION and out like a lamb? Not likely. 

The upside is a long season for early spring greens. Dandelions poking through the pavers of my back terrace are just right for the plucking: big rosettes of leaves without buds (yet).

I braised a handful of the dandelion greens in white wine (1/4 cup) and chicken stock (1/2 cup) with some chopped garlic for 15 minutes or so.

Braising is an excellent and approachable way to start trying common edible weeds. If you like braised kale, you’ll feel the same way about dandelions. Use as a side dish or as part of a composed meal, such as this fillet of halibut over braised dandelions and cannelllini beans.