Feeding ourselves with weeds

"I've been working hard this week to clear out the pigweed from my garden," my Grandpa Possehl told me last week. "Friends tell me the restaurants in Chicago will charge top dollar to let you eat it, but they use a different name for it. Starts with a P -- purl-something, pers-something, sounds kinda like parsley, but that's not it."

"Purslane?" I asked, thinking of recipes I'd read from the 1500s using that name in the ingredient lists. It appears in spring salad greens recipes, among a long list of garden herbs and members of the allium family. Lettuce is there, too, but it takes a back seat in importance.

"Yeah, that's it. A chef uses the fancy name and will pay a lot for it as a delicacy, but down on the farm we just called it pigweed, and I just pull it out in bunches and throw it out."

I jumped at the chance to taste something I'd only read about before. I wasn't even sure which weed it was until Grandpa described it. Here's a picture taken at the University of Illinois. He gamely volunteered to pull some and send it home with me along with some fresh mixed lettuces from the garden. He chuckled as he put it into a plastic bag and told Grandma, "I'm giving Heather some of that pigweed out of the garden to eat. Heck, if she likes it well enough, I'll give her a whole big garbage bag next time." As I left for home with the bag, both of them grinned conspiratorially as if they'd just gotten away with a practical joke. "Hope you like the pigweed."

My husband and I mixed together the lettuce leaves and the purslane leaves stripped from the vines and ate them with homemade dressing yesterday for dinner and today for lunch. Turns out Andrew's instincts for making salad dressing correspond with 15th Century English tastes. He mixed a dressing of about half white wine vinegar and half olive oil and salt.

The verdict? Grandpa, you should start exporting your pigweed to fancy restaurants. It's delicious! Next time purslane comes up on its own in a part of the yard or the garden box where I could afford to let it grow bigger, I'm keeping it. It is a tender green (comes from being a succulent plant that stores moisture in its leaves to use in dry times), and its tangy flavor is very similar to clover leaves, which I occasionally enjoy eating freshly plucked from the lawn.

Read more...

Late-spring soup the Finnish way

Inspired by the recipe for Kesakeitto (Finnish summer vegetable soup) in Scandinavian Cooking by Sonia Maxwell, I made a new recipe with the ingredients available in my CSA box and my refrigerator stash. Most of the veggies that are considered summer vegetables in Finland are already available garden-fresh in the springtime in Illinois.

For those who are able to tolerate dairy products, I'd recommend using real dairy cream or milk for an even better flavor.

Finnish-style Vegetable Soup
4 to 6 servings

6 small radishes with greens
3 carrots
1 handful spinach leaves
1 small head broccoli
2 Tbsp butter
2 Tbsp flour
1 egg yolk
1 1/2 cups unsweetened almond/soy milk (the traditional Finnish soup uses dairy cream)
2 Tbsp fresh herbs to garnish: dill, parsley or chives (or a mix of two or three of these)

Halve or quarter the radishes. Chop the radish and spinach leaves finely, discarding any tough stems. Cut the carrots into small dice. Cut the broccoli into bite-sized florets. Place radishes, carrots, broccoli into a small pot and cover with water. Cover pot and bring to a boil. Cook very briefly, about 3 minutes. Add radish and spinach leaves and cook 2 minutes. Strain and reserve the cooking water. Set aside cooking water and vegetables. Melt butter in a large pot. Whisk in flour, then slowly whisk in the cooking water from the vegetables and 1 cup of milk/cream and heat just short of boiling. Whisk egg yolk in a bowl with 1/2 cup milk/cream, then add 2/3 cup of the hot soup and whisk. Pour the egg yolk mixture into the soup pot and whisk together. Put the reserved vegetables in the soup pot and reheat. It is important not to heat the soup all the way to a boil, which will curdle the egg yolk. Season with salt and pepper, ladle into serving bowls and garnish with herbs.

Optional vegetable alternatives: new potatoes, peas, small bits of fish or shellfish

Read more...

What grows together, goes together: strawberries and rhubarb

All of the rhubarb recipes in my recipe box are from family members and friends who passed along their new ways of serving up this stalk so that it would take us a good long rhubarb season to start running out of ideas.

Grandma's strawberry-rhubarb jam and mom's strawberry-rhubarb bars are old favorites of mine that pair up the sweet tang of spring's fresh strawberries and the assertive tartness of rhubarb. This week, I decided to try out the classic combo in a new application, a revision of my other grandma's recipe for rhubarb sauce. The original sauce, using rhubarb and canned pineapple, is phenomenal on ice cream or mixed into yogurt or oatmeal for breakfast. But I had 2 pounds of strawberries, a very small bunch of rhubarb from the CSA box, and no pineapple.

I was not a good little girl about measuring my sugar as I was adding it, so I leave that amount up to your taste. Start at 1/2 cup and if the sauce is not sweet enough, add 1/4 cup more at a time until it's right.

The new sauce was a hit on ice cream at our anniversary/birthday party last night, with one guest asking for the recipe. If I'm lucky, he'll thank me by dropping off some rhubarb from his back yard.


Strawberry-Rhubarb Sauce
at least 10 servings

1/4 cup instant tapioca
1/2 tsp salt
2.5 cups water
2 pounds strawberries, sliced
1 cup rhubarb
1/2 cup to 1 1/2 cup sugar, to taste

Put all ingredients (start with 1/2 cup of sugar) into a large pot and bring to a boil. Taste for sweetness and add more sugar if needed. Turn down heat and simmer briefly until fruits are slightly softened, stirring often to prevent tapioca from sticking to bottom of pot. Serve when cool. Best after overnight refrigeration.

Read more...

Sour-sweet springtime treat

One of the tastes of spring I get very excited about is rhubarb, that crunchy and tart stalk that adds so much vibrancy to desserts. I still fondly recall a spring and summer childhood snack, dipping the end of a cut rhubarb stalk into a cup of sugar and eating it raw like a sugar-tipped celery stalk.

While visiting the Dane County Farmer's Market last weekend on my birthday, I bought a pound and a half of fresh, hot-pink rhubarb stalks to take home. I was dreaming of pie (like the one my grandmother said she made for my grandfather for his birthday, also last weekend), but I recalled that I had a bunch of cake flour left over from Easter and that I had powdered buttermilk in the refrigerator that needed to be used up, so I changed course and went for upside-down cake instead. The cake recipe is mostly taken straight from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything (10th Anniversary ed.), but with modifications to accommodate rhubarb, which was not one of the fruit options he gave, and the fact that I don't own a cake pan of the correct size for his original recipe.

Rhubarb upside-down cake
12 pieces

2 sticks unsalted butter, melted
1/4 cup brown sugar mixed with 1/4 cup granulated sugar
1.5 pounds rhubarb stalks, sliced
additional granulated sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Pour a few tablespoons of butter into a 9 x 13-inch rectangular cake pan. Keep the rest in a bowl for next part of recipe. Sprinkle the sugar mixture over the butter. Scatter rhubarb slices evenly over the sugar. Sprinkle the rhubarb with about 1/4 cup more granulated sugar.

8 Tbsp powdered buttermilk, reconstituted with water
4 eggs
1 cup granulated sugar
4 cups cake flour
scant 2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt

Whisk together melted butter, buttermilk, eggs and sugar until mixture lightens in color. Butter may turn to small bits instead of staying liquid. In a separate large mixing bowl, combine dry ingredients. Add the egg mixture and whisk until well-incorporated. Spread the batter over the rhubarb in the cake pan, using a spatula to evenly distribute batter. Bake in the center of oven for 50 minutes or until cake is golden and toothpick inserted into center comes out clean. Cool a few minutes in the pan and serve pieces directly from the pan or invert cake onto a serving platter. Cut into 12 pieces.

Readers may wish to add more sugar to the rhubarb-in-the-pan phase if they like the rhubarb sweeter and with less of its original astringent nature than I do.

Read more...

Chopped Salad: low on lettuce, high in flavor

Dinner that was a big bowl of salad (especially mixing fruit and lettuce) was a specialty of mine when I was single, but I dropped the habit when I started having some digestive difficulties that were exacerbated by high-insoluble-fiber leafy greens. This week, after re-reading a Cook's Illustrated article from a few years ago about chopped salads, I was inspired to play around with one of the recipes to make it my own and use items I had at home. The chopped salads are mostly stuff that is not lettuce, which got my attention.

Since seeing some improvements this year in my ability to tolerate foods that were formerly banned from the grocery list, I decided to give lettuce a chance in my dinner salad last night, but as a supporting actor only, not in a main role. When preceded by a Scandinavian crispbread as a tummy-friendly starter, last night's salad was a star.

Pears and More Chopped Salad
4 large servings or 6 side portions

1 English salad cucumber, seeded and cubed
3 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
3 Tbsp white wine vinegar
kosher salt
fresh-ground black pepper
1 red bell pepper, seeded and cut into 1/4-inch pieces
2 Bartlett pears, cored and chopped into 1/4-inch pieces (could substitute 2 crisp apples)
1/2 cup dried cranberries
1 small head green leaf lettuce, torn into bite-sized pieces
4 ounces crumbled Amish blue cheese
1/4 cup chopped pecans

Whisk oil and vinegar together in a large bowl. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Add cucumber, bell pepper, pear, toss and let stand a few minutes. Toss in lettuce, then pecans and cheese.

Best served immediately, but leftovers do keep overnight for a tangy lunch if you don't mind lettuce that is a little limp.

Read more...