armchair travel

My friend Andrea is a good friend to have.  She will agree to come along and pick cherries in unbearable weather, and show up with even more containers than you have brought--a sign of her optimism and enthusiasm.  She will share your obsession with cracking the code on some elusive Turkish or possibly Greek baked pudding that may also be boiled, which seems to contain chicken but doesn't have to, and present you with cookbooks and late-night emails testifying to her mettle as a code-cracker.  She may, if you are very lucky, also present you with a bottle of olive oil, which turns out to come from the olive grove belonging to her family in Greece.  

Then again, she may twink off to Greece for a month, and send you what can really only be described as apricot porn.  So think twice before getting too friendly with her, or you may find your inbox clogged with images like these:

all photos by Andrea, who is in Greece, and not by me, home here in Massachusetts

Look at the pits, lolling about in that sultry way, on top of the jars.

She says she has a jar of this in her suitcase for me.  I think that is the sea that I see, there behind the jars and the olive trees.  I hope some of that is in her suitcase, too.

As for what we can actually eat, the greens have been glorious lately, now that the weather is cooling off and we have had some rain.  My default treatment of a mess of greens is to saute them with garlic and tamari, but I went successfully out on a limb last night and this is how you can, too:

almost rich greens

a large bunch of kale 

a large bunch of swiss chard

2-3 T olive oil

1-2 T butter

2-3 cloves of garlic, minced

salt to taste

1-2 tsp curry powder

2-3 T heavy cream

Wash the greens (leave the washing water clinging to them) and chop them up--I like to roll them and then cut in fine ribbons.  Heat the butter and olive oil in a large, heavy skillet and saute the garlic for maybe a minute--don't let it brown, just become fragrant.  Stir in the curry powder and immediately add the greens, in batches if need be.   Cook, stirring, with maybe the addition of a splash of water if there is not enough water on the leaves, until the greens soften and become almost tender.  Now add a fat pinch of salt and the cream, and cook another few minutes, until tender enough to suit you.

strong to the finach

Here is the B-side to yesterday's wild greens paté, especially if taking your yard greens neat is a little too daunting a prospect.  I know it's kind of the same thing two days running, but nettle season is brief.  If you live a life without nettles, as a plus this version is more usefully adapted to polite, cultivated greens than the straight-up paté is.

Once you have created a garlicky, savory, emerald green paste from your wild or more refined greens, whip it into some mashed potatoes.  You know how mashed potatoes are kind of synonymous with background noise and naps?  This is their life-of-the-party cousin.

green taters

one batch of greens paté, minus the tamari & nutritional yeast

the reserved water from cooking the greens

3-4 large russet potatoes (about 2#)

1/2 cup sour cream (or buttermilk, for a less sinful version)

1/2 cup finely-grated parmesan

3T butter

salt and fresh pepper to taste

Peel and chunk the potatoes and cook them in the greens water, or regular water with a nice pinch of salt, until they are entirely tender.  Drain them (you can reserve that water and use it to make a helluva nice loaf of bread, if that's the kind of thing you are into) and let them rest, covered, on the stove for a few minutes.  Mash them well, adding the remaining ingredients, until you achieve your preferred degree of smoothness, and adjust the seasonings to your liking.  If you won't be eating them right away, smooth them into a buttered casserole dish, and do the top with additional butter and a sprinkling of parmesan, and reheat in a nice hot oven when you are ready for them.

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.

stuck in the weeds

As long as we are digging around in the yard for our dinner, we may as well talk about another mighty weed, the dandelion. If you thought burdock was a powerhouse you could no longer live without, wait until you get a load of dandelion. Although our name from it proceeds from the French ("dents de lion," or lion's teeth, because of its serrated edges), its common French name is "pissenlit," which means, none too politely, "wet the bed." In case you think I am making this up, here is the tag that was on the bunch I just bought at the grocery store:

This is particularly amusing because it turns out that what I bought was in fact chicory, but as the mighty herb witch Susun Weed is careful to explain, they are sister plants and often confused, which is OK because they share many of the same benefits and all of the same guidelines for preparation.

I am not sure we have time to list all the fantastic things that dandelion can do for you. Though you can rest assured you are unlikely to wet your bed in any language, dandelion is a flusher. Like all bitter vegetables, it is a digestive, and a boon to your liver and other organs of sanitation. It is astoundingly high in calcium and the antioxidants A and C. Believe me, this is the proverbial tip of the iceberg, and if you just want to dip a toe in the waters here, try mincing up a few leaves of dandelion greens and adding them to your iceberg or other lettuces, particularly at the start of a meal, in order to make the most of all the digestive benefits.

You can also cook them, preferably in a cast-iron pot, and here again a mixture of dandelion and a milder green like spinach will ease you into the project if you're unsure how much bitter you want on your plate. Dandelion greens, which are long and slender and pointy and sometimes red-stemmed, are widely available in the market here now, as are fatter bunches that look more like spinach, labeled as above, and which might just be chicory. Bitterness varies greatly from bunch to bunch, but be aware the red-stemmed varieties tend to pack more of it.

sweet & sour greens

2 bunches dandelion greens, or a mixture of dandelion and spinach
2-3 carrots, peeled and coarsely diced
1 medium onion, diced
2-3 T olive oil
generous pinch of salt
1 t finely grated fresh ginger root
2t balsamic vinegar
1 t tamari or shoyu

Wash the greens very well (they tend to be sandy); trim and discard the tough ends and coarsely chop the leaves. If you are using spinach as well as dandelion, keep them separate for now as the spinach won't need to be blanched first.

Bring a medium pot of water to boil and salt it well. As the water heats, heat a skillet with the olive oil. Sauté the onion in the oil over low to medium heat. When the water boils and the onions are just beginning to brown, drop in the carrots and cook for about 2 minutes. Use a slotted spoon to pull the carrots from the water and drop them into the pan. Turn the heat up to medium, and continue to sauté; the carrots should lighten and the onions start to brown nicely. Drop the dandelion into the water now, and stir to submerge it all and make sure it wilts. Use the spoon to scoop the greens into the pan with the onions and carrots. Add the spinach, if you are using it; the moisture in the cooked greens should be enough to steam the spinach as you stir. Add the tamari and vinegar, and the grated ginger, and stir and cook a minute or two more until the mixture is well-coated in the slightly thickened sauce. If you did use a cast-iron pan, be sure to remove the cooked greens as soon as they are done.

The blanching water from the greens and carrots will add some dandelion power to the cooking of rice or other foods. I'm just saying. It fits comfortably down the drain, too.