August 2006

Some friends came over for dinner last night. Cristy made chicken, beans and rice, sauteed lamb's quarters and salad. Everyone liked the lamb's quarters.

Since I didn't eat five pounds of them, I didn't get a tummy ache.

We've been ignoring our garden area for the last two months or so when it started getting too hot to bother with it, so now it's overgrown with a jungle of lamb's quarters.

It's August 12. Can lamb's quarters still be eaten? Everything I've read says that they should be eaten in spring, which is the only time we've eaten them. Early spring is also when the greens that we've planted, mainly chard and kale, are at their best, so we tend to favor those for obvious reasons.

One of the apparent differences in summertime lamb's quarters is the size of the leaves - they're generally smaller than they were in the spring, but there's more of them.

I went out with a plastic bag and picked the leaves like you would pick berries. I was pretty sure that I didn't want any of the leaf stems and that I didn't want to spend time cutting them off of each leaf, so I was careful to pinch off each leaf right at the top of the stem.

After about 15 minutes I had what the kitchen scale said was about 6 ounces, which is more than enough for one meal for two people.

We decided to cook them using a Korean spinach recipe from The Best Recipes in the World by Mark Bittman, page 33) that mainly involved sauteeing. It's a pretty easy and quick recipe. Cristy decided to split the cooking experiment up into three sections:

1. Blanching.
2. Blanching, then sauteeing.
3. Sauteeing.

Cristy divided up the leaves into two piles, then boiled the first for 1-2 minutes. She just strained half of that and put it on a plate. I salted it and put some sri ratcha on it.

The results were surprisingly good. It really needed the salt, but it wasn't bitter and pretty much tasted like any boiled green might. The leaves weren't tough at all.

Then she took the rest of the boiled leaves, drained them and sauteed them in a cast-iron skillet for a couple minutes, then dumped them onto a plate.

Even better. But... there was a weird aftertaste... I'm not sure how to describe it... almost like something was coating your mouth. It could be that it might not even be noticed if you were eating this as a side dish with chicken or potatos or whatever, but there was definitely something there.

Finally she took the remaining leaves and dumped them right into the skillet and cooked them for a couple minutes and then plated.

These tasted mostly like the boiled and sauteed, but the leaves were al dente. There was no strange aftertaste as with the previous batch.

As I write this I have a little nausea. Too many greens?