Straight from the Farm

No matter how much I enjoy them, I always feel a little strange about eating dandelion greens.  It’s also strange to think about somebody purposely growing dandelions, don’t you think?  But the truth is, they’re mighty tasty, in that slightly bitter way. 

The farm is growing dandelions for the first time this year, and the large bunch I brought home with me landed on the counter next to the mesh bag of baby red potatoes I’d just picked up at the store.  Fate would have these two ingredients married together over the course of the next hour into a hearty warm salad, one of those concoctions where I raided the fridge and threw in whatever seemed viable, including the rest of the chicory from last week.

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It’s so wonderful to have an abundance of fresh delicious produce again.  Just seems like a few weeks ago that we locavores were subsisting on potatoes and the last dredges of canned goods.  The sight of plump ruby red strawberries at the Headhouse Market nearly made me weak in the knees.  Nothing, and I mean nothing, compares in sensual eating to the first bite of a juicy, ripe, just-picked strawberry.  At least that’s the way I feel about it. 

Helping out at the Weavers Way Farm table at the Headhouse Market was like going home.  I’d missed it more than I even knew: the energy generated by shoppers and farmers all focused on freshly harvested food.  Of course, it didn’t hurt that I could load up on all sorts of glorious greens and some asparagus. 

I picked up a few more bunches of the edible chrysanthemum to try mixed in with the other salad greens I procured.  I thought the zing and tenderness of the chrysanthemum might contrast nicely with the edgier endive and smooth butter lettuce.  And, of course, my dear old friend kohlrabi got tossed in the shopping sack.  I actually had a great time “pushing” the kohlrabi at the farm’s table.  So many people hadn’t ever seen it before, asking questions about how to use it.  If you hadn’t guessed, I love answering question about how to prepare unusual fresh vegetables. 

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I’m learning a very valuable life lesson these days.  Change, for the better or for the worse, is strangely easier to deal with in larger quantities. I’ve already mentioned the big change I made recently in careers. If I’d had my druthers, that change would have been more than enough for me for a year or so.  But following close behind it, much to my initial dread, was another big change.  D and I bought a house and moved into it this past weekend.  So now, in about a month’s time, both my job and my home are completely different. 

Moving to the new house was looming in my head for the past month.  Don’t get me wrong, I helped pick it out so I was happy with the new house.  I just didn’t want to leave the old one, what with the four years of junk stored up in the basement and the kitchen I’d come to love so much.  I don’t think I posted many pictures on here of my old kitchen, but it was adorably retro with red walls and a decidedly Asian flair that I had carefully cultivated.  I’d moved in there while I was still single so everything was arranged just the way I liked it.  The one downside though was its size: 8 feet by 10 feet.  Ouch.  When we picked out the new house, the kitchen was top priority for me. 

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Sometimes it’s the little things that tickle a person.  Things that make the corners of your mouth turn up just a notch and put a gleam in your eyes.  That’s what happened when Farmer Dave asked me to play around with a new crop on Weavers Way Farm.  I was tickled because it was, whether he realized it to be or not, a little pat on the back that said “Hey, you’re pretty much an expert at figuring out how to use farm produce so naturally I’d ask you to create a recipe for me.”  

This mystery ingredient, however, was completely new to me too.  Edible Chrysanthemum is known by many names (Garland Chrysanthemum, Crown Daisy, Shingiku, Choy Suy Green, Tong Ho, Ssukgat, etc.) around the world and is used mostly in Asian dishes, from what I could gather.  It is different from the ornamental mums you put out in your flower beds or deck containers each fall.  Its leaves do look similar though.  Farmer Dave was asking me to play around with the stuff since he didn’t know what to tell customers at market who asked how to use it.  Well, those customers weren’t the only ones without a clue.

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The other day something so utterly bizarre happened that I literally stopped in my tracks and stared, mouth agape. There, among a box of seeds sitting on a neighbors porch, was a packet of purslane seeds!   Any gardener worth his or her salt knows that purslane is a nasty invasive weed that can take over a garden plot in a week if left to its own devices.  Who the heck would sell its seeds?  And why the heck would anyone buy them?  Sadly, I know the answer to both those questions.  Purslane has recently become a highly favored gourmet addition to salads and such in upscale restaurants.  I’m guessing some marketing guru got the notion to sell its seeds, not knowing enough about its cultivation to realize it was a weed!  I could only shake my head in disbelief.

Eating weeds is not a new concept though.  In fact, I think it’s one that should be highly encouraged, with a little weed identification education of course.  Don’t go out and eat just any weed. Only some are edible.  But once you know what is edible – and some are quite delicious – go get ‘em! 

It certainly is a unique way to clean out the invasive species from your garden or local park.  One caveat though when foraging for edible weeds: be sure you know if they’ve been sprayed.  It’s best to get them out of your own garden or overgrown backyard if you can. And let’s face it, we all have a weed or two somewhere.  

I’ve been doing a lot of weed pulling in my new line of work/study and one that repeatedly rears its unusually pretty head is garlic mustard.  It’s a member of the Brassicaceae family (the one with broccoli and cabbage in it), and it gets the same small white flowers when it bolts into seed.  It spends its first year low to the ground though as a mounded rosette of deep green kidney-shaped leaves.  It’s a little harder to identify if you don’t know what you’re looking for, but I think these younger clumps make for better eating. 

While pulling a few hundred garlic mustard plants, I meditated on the name and decided it surely must be edible with a name that included two delicious flavor agents.  After a little research, I learned it was once a very regular part of the colonial diet as an herb and salad green, particularly in winter when not much other green leafy stuff was available (garlic mustard pops its head up before anything else in the Northeast which is one of the reasons why it’s such a “successful” weed).  Since it’s a prolific seeder, at some point it no doubt got out in the woods where it grew like crazy in the shade and has ever since been the scourge of all those horticulturalist intent upon preserving native undergrowth in our woodlands. 

I’m always intrigued by older food traditions and the idea of putting a weed to good use, much like my beloved sorrel (weed-turned-delicacy), set my cook senses tingling.  Since I was thinking of sorrel as a good cultural comparison and maybe even somewhat similar in flavor, I decided to revisit the recipe I created for sorrel almond pesto to see if I could make a spring version of that more summery dish.  I still have some frozen basil on hand and instead of fresh tomatoes accompanying the pesto, I put the last of my oven-dried tomatoes to use.  Presto, some fresh *spring* pesto!   And a few less weeds in my yard to boot!

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