Writing About Edible Weeds for Martha

I've been meeting lately with our local schoolyard greening organization, planning an annual seminar to teach teachers about how to build and utilize school gardens. It takes me back to last year's event, when the menu for our garden lunch included a pesto dish made with chickweed out of my own garden.

Well, the chickweed is back with a vengeance. I'm feeling the urge to make pesto again. Not so coincidentally, this month's Martha Stewart Living magazine contains a piece by yours truly on the edible qualities of a number of weeds.

Weeds? Why do we call them weeds? The definition of a weed would be a plant that has no particular use, that serves only to annoy us. Yet the common dandelion, while it may unhinge the homeowner in love with his perfect lawn, makes a dandy addition to a salad, or a side dish collected in a heap and braised. Purslane wants to drive us round the bend, poking its head out of every crack in the sidewalk. Yet, once you get past the slightly mucilagenous texture, purslane is full of nutrition, and you don't have to pay a cent for it.

Shades of Euell Gibbon! Is foraging making a comeback? Well, I don't see my neighbors rushing out to pick the dandelion greens that are just now emerging everywhere. It's a bit amusing to see those very dandelion greens selling in big bunches at the local Whole Foods, or the purslane being hawked at the farmers market. But it's true that many of these and other wild things are being cultivated for the more sophisticated markets. Look closely and you may find one of your favorite vendors selling the seeds. I planted an Italian variety of dandelion last year, and it produced like a champ.

The star of the show without a doubt is the wild leek, known hereabouts as ramps. Soon they will be popping up in forests all over the eastern half of the country. They, too, have started appearing in farmers markets and in white tablecloth restaurants. But no one has found a way to cultivate ramps--not yet. They're still a wild child, and there's so much picking going on, the national parks have had to ban foraging for ramps.

The Martha Stewart article includes a tantalizing recipe for rabbit with pappardelle, ramps and wild garlic. There's also an intriguing flatbread with sorrel pesto and "edible-weed salad." Again, what's with the "weed "? After doing a bit of research for the text, I was inspired to purchase some burdock seeds. And now I'm curious to know if lamb's quarters really taste like spinach.

It makes you want to carve out a day soon when you can just poke around the neighborhood for the proverbial free lunch.

Wild Pesto That Saved the Day

The chickweed pesto was a sensation at yesterday's schoolyard greening lunch.

So imagine my chagrin when, after getting up at the crack of dawn to make a last-minute vinaigrette for one of my pasta salads, and after pulling platters to display the lunch on, and after hauling all this equipment plus a cooler full of food to the National Arboretum ( to say nothing of getting my wife out of bed so she could drive me there so she could have the car for the day)--imagine my dismay when I finally arrived at the Washington Youth Garden at 8:30 in the AM to find that I had forgotten to pack the ckickweed pesto.

I just stared into that cooler. And stared. And stared...

It was one of those Can-We-Just-Have-One-Do-Over moments...

Jenny, the garden manager, soon to be moving to Brooklyn to manage a garden there, was particularly distraught. She had been so looking forward to that pesto. I thought she was going to make me run home--literally, on foot-- and fetch it. Then one of our organizers volunteered to drive the several miles back to my house in the District of Columbia to collect the AWOL container of pesto.

Yet, when I called home to alert my wife to all this, she saved the day by agreeing to deliver the pesto after dropping our daughter off at ballet, which happens to be not so far from the arboretum.

Whew...

As I mentioned in an earlier post, this was Day 2 of the annual Schoolyard Greening teacher's clinic wherein we subject the teachers to approximately four hours of hands-on instruction in seed planting and transplanting, cultivating and educating with herbs, composting and vermiculture and--for my part--maintaining the garden (e.g. preventing or getting rid of weeds in an organic fashion).

This being my first year as an instructor, I was relying on the kindness of these teachers to tolerate my fumblings and just let me get through it.

I did think it was highly appropriate (brilliant, even) that our pesto featured chickweed, otherwise a noxious garden intruder. To illustrate the point, I found plenty of chickweed frolicking over the Youth Garden grounds while I was giving my little clinic in weed maintenance. There were a few gasps when I demonstrated that there are more than one way to deal with weeds, and plucked a few of the more succulent chickweed stems and ate them au naturel.

Otherwise, there were cheers all around for the food. The curry-roasted cauliflower and the collard-goat cheese frittata were completely devoured. Many came back for seconds on the "Caesar" salad with fresh garden lettuce and homemade croutons. I simply made too much of the pasta salad duo: penne with grilled chicken, artichoke and chickweed pesto, whole wheat rotini with spring vegetables and lemon vinaigrette.

In fact, there were several requests for the chickweed pesto recipe. We'll just have to do this again next year. Maybe we can even work a few more weeds into the menu.

Triumph of the Chickweed

Chickweed, or stellaria media, normally is the bane of the vegetable garden. It grows in great creeping matts, insinuating itself into the beds, twining itself around the plants we are trying to grow for food.

This time of year, chickweed is just beginning to bloom and form seeds here in the District of Columbia. So by all means, get rid of it wherever you find it, right?

Well, not so fast. Yes, we are pulling it up everywhere we see it, or cutting it down with the mower. We definitely do not want it going to seed. But did you know that chickweed is edible?

Chickweed is high in vitamin C, also in magnesium, potassium and calcium. It's sold in tablet form as an herbal supplement. But that is hardly my point. What I'm trying to get at is, although I would not go around harvesting chickweed to serve for dinner, I am using great gobs of it for the lunch I am preparing for approximately 30 people attending Day 2 of our D.C. Schoolyard Greening teacher's clinic, taking place today at the Washington Youth Garden.

That's right, I am serving a weed for lunch.

I recently acquired a copy of The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, by Sandor Ellix Katz. He's the fellow that wrote the book about wild fermentation that I am so often quoting when making sauerkraut. The more recent volume is about various food movements, such as the raw milk movement, community supported agriculture, seed saving, to name a few.

Around page 34, Katz pauses to compose an ode to chickweed, which he apparently devours by the fistful when he's out in the garden. Sounds a bit primitive, I agree. But he also gives a perfectly reasonable recipe for turning said weed into a pesto.

So I thought, why not?

I gathered up a bag full of chickweed from the garden, making my vegetable beds very happy. I washed it a couple of times, picking out stray bits of this and that. I then committed a horrible sin: I ran several cups full of chickweed through the food processor.

Sorry, but I was in a hurry. I violated all my personal rules about making sauces and pestos in an actual mortar and pesto. So sue me.

I removed the chickweed and dropped about five cloves of garlic into the processor. Then perhaps 1 1/2 cups of walnuts. Then back in went the chickweed and maybe 1/2 cup of extra-virgin olive oil drizzled in while the machine was running. Then I added, oh, about 1 cup of grated Parmesan cheese and whipped that in. And maybe 1/2 teaspoon of salt.

So it has all the look and feel of a real pesto, this chickweed concoction. My wife wasn't so very enthusiastic about it. But for me it truely is a revelation.

But wait--we're not done. I had a container of Latin crema, or sour cream, in the fridge, so I added that, maybe 1/2 cup. Now the pesto rose to glorious heights. I will be mixing it with a pasta salad of penne, grilled chicken, red onion, artichoke hearts and capers.

Sounds pretty delicious and springlike, no?

The rest of the menu cosists of:

A whole wheat fussili pasta salad primavera with asparagus, carrots, peas and baby lettuces out of our garden.

A "Caesar" salad of lettuces that overwintered in the garden, with homemade croutons.

Frittata with collards and kale harvested from the garden, along with goat cheese and garlic chives.

We had originally hoped to make this meal around locally grown produce. Then we decided it was too early in the year to find local produce. But lookey here: Half of this meal is made with ingredients out of my own garden.

Who knew?