Bitter Herbs Salad

世界各地马齿苋（Purslane）的多种吃法４　组图




Wild Purslane Salad with Cucumber and Summer Tomatoes

Jul28

A bowl full of fresh weeds!
A bowl full of fresh weeds!

I wonder if you would un-invite yourself to dinner at my house if I told you that I was pulling a few weeds from the backyard and tossing them into a salad. Well? Still coming?

I became curious about purslane, also known as portulaca, porcellana and verdolaga, when I first read about it in Honey from a Weed - one of my most inspiring cookbooks.

During the Sixties the author, Patience Gray, accompanied her partner – a sculptor with “an appetite for marble” – on a quest throughout the Mediterranean; from the Greek Islands, through Tuscany and on to the Italian boot heel, Apulia. They lived in some pretty rugged circumstances, meeting the locals and eating lots of simple, rustic food. Her book is more like a memoir-travelogue with recipes, and reading it never fails to make me hungry.

In the Edible Weeds chapter, Gray describe how in springtime she would observe people foraging for certain tender weeds and herbs like wild fennel, chervil, mustard, dandelion and arugula, and tossing them with oil and lemon juice before devouring them as if they were bowls of vegetable spaghetti.

This is the origin of Mesclun, once a seasonal, wild mix of greens and now a ubiquitous prewashed plastic package of salad shipped from one coast to the other. Don’t get me wrong – those bags and boxes are a huge improvement over heads of boring iceberg lettuce and my life wouldn’t be the same without them, but there’s also something calculated and manufactured about their consistent allotment of salad; just so many pieces of radicchio, twiggy sticks of curly frisee and pieces of baby romaine. There’s not much wild in there.

Which leads me to my foraging experiment. Here I am in mid-summer with a yard full of weeds in their prime: crabgrass, hairy vetch, pokeweed, common spurge (often confused with purslane, but actually poisonous!) and purslane.

I admit I had some trepidation about eating a weed that I normally yank out from between the bricks of my front walk and throw into the yard waste pile, but felt better after I reminded myself that I was eating a wild food from my own yard. That’s pretty darn local.

It turns out that my weedy purslane is fleshy and succulent, with a mild flavor like bean sprouts.  I didn’t find the texture to be at all “mucilaginous” – another word often used to describe its texture – thank goodness. I’m not a fan of slimy greens. I like that it’s crunchy and sweetly juicy when you eat a bite.

Purslane is also a mega source of precious Omega-3 fatty acids – more than any other green vegetable.

Along with some pea sprouts from Claverach Farm, I had a few little garden-grown yellow pear tomatoes and a cucumber from my friend Jenn, which I added to a bowl.  I sprinkled everything with some lemon juice, really good extra-virgin olive oil, some sea salt and pepper. A salad was born!





Chick Pea Salad with Purslane and Arugula -

Jul_9_purslane_2

Purslane salad

When I was in high school I was a botany nerd. I spent time identifying wild flowers, I liked to grow plants from seeds and spent hours studying seed catalogs, and I wanted to be a pomologist when I grew up. Pomology? The study of the cultivation of fruit.Yeah, I know. Way to fit in!

I spent the summer after ninth grade reading and rereading a book from the 1940s I'd found in the library called Fruits for the Home Garden by U.P. Hedrick which was an encyclopedic listing of all the fruits, particularly apples, in cultivation. It was filled with descriptions of apple varieties no longer cultivated commercially that had romantic and poetic names like the Chenango Strawberry or Cox's Orange Pippin. It was U.P. Hedrick who inspired my pomologist aspirations. No, I had no idea what a pomologist actually did.

As a botany nerd, another of my inspirations was an amateur botanist named Euell Gibbons who had written an unlikely sounding bestseller called Stalking the Wild Asparagus in the early 1960s which was about edible plants that grow wild with recipes for preparing them. From his book I learned to identify a number of edible plants although in high school I had little interest in cooking so I didn't make very many of these recipes. I do remember using staghorn sumac from which I made indian lemonade, which was pretty delicious, but I think the only other thing I cooked was pokeweed as part of an 11th grade ecology class project.  I led my class in a tour of edible plants in Rock Creek Park, we collected pokeweed shoots, and then I cooked them for the class.

Hey, it was the early 70s; this sort of thing was completely normal, at least at my school. The high school I went to was a small "alternative" school where the students were allowed to come to school barefoot if they wished and we addressed our teachers by their first name. My ecology teacher was a man who had worked as an aerospace engineer but wanted to do something more meaningful with his life (I think it was one of those tune in, turn on, and drop out sort of things) and found himself teaching math and science to a group of high school students. This was the poor man who had to teach me algebra 2 and trigonometry and would spend his time endlessly explaining various concepts of algebra and trigonometry all the while hoping to see some flicker of recognition from me. It never happened. I don't know how I passed.

Most of the cooking of the pokeweed was actually done by one of my friends who was an accomplished cook for a high-schooler and she directed me in the boiling of the polk shoots and she made the hollandaise that sauced them. I don't remember how they tasted -- I've never made them again so they could not have been that good -- but I did get an A on the project. My ecology teacher said, "well, uh, I really don't know anything about this stuff but you seem like you do so I'm giving you an A."  Again, this was the early 70s. Those were different times.

Another edible plant I was introduced to by Stalking the Wild Asparagus was purslane which is actually cultivated as a vegetable in other parts of the world. I never really ate it except to nibble on raw pieces which were pleasantly acidic.  But  through the years I've noticed it growing in sidewalk cracks or along alleys, and last year one of the vendors at the farmer's market was selling it. I also noticed it growing as a weed in my garden plot but this year, instead of weeding it out, I weeded around it. As I was waiting for my purslane to get a little bigger I came across a reference to purslane in a blog I just started reading called Dirt Sun Rain. Steven, the blog's author,  uses purslane in salads which seemed like a good place to start and when I googled for purslane recipes, almost the first thing I hit was this recipe in the NY Times which ran as part of this article:

Chick Pea Salad with Purslane and Arugula

1 cup drained cooked or canned chick peas

1 teaspoon capers

2 to 3 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1 scallion, thinly sliced

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, or as needed

2 tablespoons lemon juice, or as needed

Salt

1 1/2 cups arugula leaves, torn into pieces

1 1/2 to 2 cups purslane with tender stems, cut into 1-inch lengths, or 3/4 cup purslane leaves

1. In a bowl, combine chick peas, capers, garlic and scallion. Add olive oil, lemon juice, and salt to taste.

2. Add arugula and purslane, and mix well. Season with additional olive oil, lemon juice, or salt if desired.

I made lunch for my parent's yesterday and they are the perfect people to try purslane with. It carries them back to my botany nerd days which they're very sentimental about. My mother particularly likes to reminisce about things like the time I grew marijuana plants that I told her were snapdragon plants which she then planted around our mailbox. Luckily for me while I was formulating my plans to surreptitiously buy real snapdragon plants and replace the marijuana plants, the marijuana plants all died. Just for the record,  as a botany nerd I wasn't interested in smoking marijuana, just growing it.

The purslane from my garden is not as succulent as the varieties I see at the farmer's market and the taste was not distinctive, just pleasantly mild and slightly acidic, but this salad was absolutely delicious -- lemony and garlicky with the purslane and chick peas acting as a nice foil for the sharper flavors. And an interesting fact about purslane: it apparently has more omega-3 fatty acids than any other leafy green vegetables. This stuff is good for you! Which is good to know because I now plan to get rid of all the purslane in my garden plot by making this salad. I really enjoyed it.


 

en.wikipedia.org Glistrida_Greek_salad.JPG 3264 × 2448 - 2199k - jpg	yummly.com Purslane Salad Herb Recipes | Yummly 230 × 230 - 25k	yummly.com Purslane Salad Herb Recipes | Yummly 230 × 230 - 18k	pilotguides.com Istanbul, Turkey | The Official Globe Trekker WebsiteThe Official ... 640 × 390 - 194k - jpg
food52.com Purslane Salad recipe on Food52. 584 × 389 - 311k - jpg	forkfingerschopsticks.com Purslane: Raw Purslane Weed Salad | Fork Fingers Chopsticks 495 × 364 - 98k - jpg	66squarefeet.blogspot.com 66 Square Feet: July 2011 960 × 1440 - 182k - jpg	saratogafarmersmarket.org Purslane Salad with Garlic-Yogurt Dressing | Saratoga Farmers' Market 1280 × 960 - 549k - jpg
scandifoodie.blogspot.com Scandi Home: March 2012 580 × 819 - 265k - jpg	scandifoodie.blogspot.com Scandi Home: March 2012 580 × 876 - 213k - jpg	blog.wenxuecity.com 老恐龙大妈，美国马齿苋图片英文在此，您还有啥话 700 × 1050 - 357k - jpg	recipe4success.org Dish with Gracie: Search Results 500 × 390 - 102k - jpg
food52.com Purslane Salad recipe on Food52. 388 × 400 - 39k - jpg	scandifoodie.blogspot.com Scandi Home: March 2012 580 × 876 - 185k - jpg	forkfingerschopsticks.com Purslane: Raw Purslane Weed Salad | Fork Fingers Chopsticks 495 × 371 - 115k - jpg	naturopathicgourmet.bl... Purslane Salad with Figs and Walnuts | The Naturopathic Gourmet 880 × 660 - 203k - jpg