the old man is snoring

 

Buckets of rain today.  No complaining is allowed, because we have been so dry here that valid fears were harbored for the growing season.  I rely on the growing season for sanity as well as sustenance, and round about May 1 my fatigue with the purchase of well-traveled produce is reaching its peak.  My version of the general strike?  I will eat from my yard today, and let our seriously unstable commercial food system grind on without my Tuesday participation.  It may tumble.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

The first green shoots to poke up here see my smiling face, and my scissors, right above them.  My dearly beloved once saw me quietly rejecting the frisée in a fancy salad and expressed confusion.  A green that I didn't like?  "But you'll eat anything the mower kicks up!" he exclaimed.  Trying to eat frisée, in my opinion, is like chewing the top of a pineapple.  It's pretty and all, but best admired from a distance.  The yard has plenty to offer in its place.

In its purest form, with all the weeds in it, this is not a terribly practical, everyday kind of recipe.  Though substituting more refined, cultivated greens for the wild will still give you a very tasty result, it's the wildness and fleeting season that make it special to me.  

The recipe has mysterious roots, appropriately enough.  When the farmer's market first opened in our town about ten years ago, there was a group of (I say this lovingly) long-haired freaky people who came each week in the spring with little hand-lettered tubs of this stuff, or something like it, and they gave away enough free samples that soon their table was cleared off within moments of the market opening each week.  Then they vanished.  The next year they turned up at a different market, and then I never saw them again.  Using their label, which listed the ingredients, I came up with this version. It is mighty stuff.  The effect of eating what grows right near you is potent, and after a long winter off, it courses through the veins with a noticeable lilt.

If you wonder what lamb's quarters are like, here you go.  They have a distinctively pebbly white dust on the undersides of their leaves, and often a purplish color to the stems.  They are a tender and delicious substitute for spinach and have a nice long season.  They like recently-dug up patches of earth; we have a nice crop around our compost pile.

 

Nettles are sawtooth-edged plants with a pronounced sting when you touch them, and are best picked with scissors into a basket or bag.  Take the tender tops only, and steer clear of roadsides.  Their season (for eating, not stinging) is pretty short.  By the time the weather warms up, they are too tough to eat.  But grab them while you can--nothing else tastes quite like them.

wild greens paté

1 bunch ramps, or substitute a couple of cloves of garlic and some chives or green onions

1 fat bouquet (not that I recommend you clutch it) of nettles, tender tops only

1 fat bouquet of lamb’s quarters, or substitute two big handfuls of baby spinach

2t nutritional yeast

2t tamari or light soy

Wash the nettles very, very, very well (they love to harbor grit), and carefully (consoling yourself that nettle stings are reported to cure joint pain, if it comes to that). Wash the lamb's quarters or spinach. Clean the ramps and chop the bulbs and leaves separately.

Bring a 2 quart pot of water to boil and give it a fat pinch of salt. Drop in the nettles and cook for a minute, then drop in the lamb's quarters and/or spinach. Stir a few times and then drain, rinsing under cool water to refresh. Coarsely chop and reserve. The cooking water is full of nutrients and is tasty in stock or soup, if you roll that way.

Heat the olive oil in a medium skillet and sauté the ramp bulbs until they soften. Add the ramp greens, and a few stirs later, the reserved cooked greens. Add a tablespoon or so of water to smooth it out and simmer over low heat until everything is quite tender and still bright green and not terribly wet. Remove to a food processor and add the nutritional yeast (I know it smells weird, but trust me) and tamari, and pulse until you have a thick purée. Taste and adjust for salt and pepper, to your taste.

reweeding

The other day at the grocery store, I heard a woman (a well-heeled woman, who had parked next to me so I saw her snazzy wheels and knew this shocking thing I am about to tell you was not likely an issue of cash flow) ask the young man in the produce department where she could find fresh mint. He pointed it out. She said, “can I buy half a bunch?” and to my amazement, he said yes. “Good,” she said. “And I want half a bunch of basil, too.”

The very idea! Nice Produce Guy says that happens frequently enough that they have a policy about it, which apparently is to say yes even though it is possibly the silliest thing I can imagine asking a produce guy, other than maybe “can you peel this orange for me, and then can I pay less per pound?”

My reactionary response is a recipe for a metric butt-load of dip, because I was loathe to leave you with either the desire to ask the produce person for half a bunch of dandelions, or if that proves untenable to you, with half a bunch of dandelions themselves.

Dandelions continue to be the snappiest-looking things in the greens aisle, so I continue to seek out ways to make them into something. I started out thinking I was making pesto here, and I bet you could use it that way. So far, I am just eating it, but I watched someone in the kitchen spread it on bread, and someone else glopped it onto some noodles.

For the olives here I used the regular old kind you might put in your martini, not anything fancy, and I like the sweetness of the almonds to balance out the strong taste of the greens but you could make do with another nut that amuses you. These proportions made something quite thick that sits nicely on a piece of bread; increase the olive oil a bit and use just 1/4 cup of nuts to get something more sauce-like. If the quantity exceeds your capacity, I think it would freeze well.

dandelion pesto

makes about 1.5 cups

1 bunch of dandelion greens

about 4 ozs baby spinach leaves

¾ c EV olive oil

1/2 to 2 cloves garlic, as you prefer

½ c pitted green olives

2t preserved lemon, or 2 t lemon juice and a pinch of salt

3.5 ozs feta cheese, crumbled

¼ c raw sunflower seeds

½ c raw almonds

Thoroughly wash the greens so you don't end up with grit in your dip. Nobody likes that. Chop off the thicker stem-ends of the dandelion and discard (or give them to a sheep, if one lives nearby), and then coarsely chop the leaves. Place about a third of the greens in the container of a blender or food processor with the olive oil and garlic and whizz to break them down a bit, then add another third of the greens, or as the capacity of your machine indicates until they are all in there. When all the greens are roughly chopped, add the remaining items and process to your desired degree of smoothness. Taste and adjust seasonings.