Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Wild Weed Quesadillas + 7 Asparagus Recipes

Quesadillas with raw garlic mustard leaves, steamed cattail shoots, and sauteed daylily greens.
I have written about foraging before. Here, for example, just last year. But oh, if you have not availed yourself of the green green thrill of cramming bitter wild leaves into your winter-starved mouth, please try it. Even if you live in, say, New York City, where someone you know may or may not have eaten wild garlic mustard that was growing near the reservoir in Central Park. (Sorry, Ma. But urban foraging is all the rage!)

My Mother's Day card from Birdy. Inside it says, "I can't wait to continue eating our way through the outdoors." ("Yew (oops!)" refers to a poisonous little incident we once got ourselves into. A story for another day.)
Birdy is my partner in foraging, and it is just a heavenly way to spend a spring afternoon: consulting our guides, picking and tasting, soaking up sunshine and screaming about snakes. If a person were starting to drift towards a kind of hormonal situation of the teenaged kind, this would be the perfect hearty, companionable antidote, if you get what I'm saying. Besides that all the slap-in-the-face bitterness of the greens themselves pretty much constitutes life at its most bracing.

Steamed garlic mustard and cattail shoots with hollandaise. I used this Foolproof 2-Minute Hollandaise recipe, and it was perfect.
I'll recommend, again, the marvelous Backyard Foraging by Ellen Zachos. We had checked it out of the library for such an unconscionably long time that we finally just went ahead and bought a copy. The other book we bought after careful consideration was Edible Wild Plants by John Kallas. It contains plants only, but has very detailed descriptions and photographs of common edibles at different stages of growth. But even if all you do is go outside, yank a dandelion (you'll know it's a dandelion because there will be a dandelion flower), and chew its wildly bitter leaves, you'll still be a happier and healthier person for it.
12 and 15. WHAT? I wrote something here about babies and how I don't have any.
I should note, however, that the thrill seems, at least to some extent, related to the happy-survival neurochemicals your brain rewards you with for finding food: the people who foraged the plants always LOVE to eat them, while the people who are simply served the weedy meals feel decidedly MEDIOCRE about them. 

Oh, spring! Tis the season of the cigar-tube vase. 
And if this is all too much for you, buy a nice, fat bunch of nice, fat asparagus and prepare those instead. I'm still at the exclusively steamed-with-butter phase of my seasonal gorging, but in a couple weeks I'll start to diverge. Here are some recipes, some recently moved here from farflung earlier postings.

Asparagus with Brown Butter
Asparagus with Pink-Grapefruit Sauce
Asparagus Bread Pudding
Roasted Asparagus with Lemon and Parmesan
Brown Rice Salad with Asparagus, Feta, and Lemon
Asparagus with Savory Lemon Jam
Edited to add: Asparagus with Delicious Dip

Happy spring, my darlings. xo

22 comments:

  1. For a second I thought Ben was Michael. Wow.

    Thanks to you, I pick purslane at the bus stop. I've also been making your Asparagus with Delicious Dip almost nightly. I'm making it from memory which means I'm probably forgetting an ingredient. Garlic?

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    Replies
    1. Also your post about babies made me cry. I am straddling both worlds now and it is so odd. Still dragging a preschooler afraid of bees to track meets, yet baby-free and officially an old mom at preschool pickup.

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    2. Wait, the Delicious Dip link isn't working anymore. Recipe please!

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    3. Okay! I added it! Thank you for requesting it, dear MG.

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  2. They are so big! I loved they no more babies piece. I just have to remember in the midst of chaos, how much I am going to miss this.

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  3. Anonymous5:44 PM

    Jesus Christ, Ben is a man! Yikes!

    Mine are 12 and 15, too, but both girls. It's a bittersweet time.

    Keryn

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    Replies
    1. Anonymous5:48 PM

      Now I read the other piece and am crying. :(

      Delete
  4. dale in denver6:10 PM

    "given the whole beard situation" - ikr. what is up with the beard situation?

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  5. michelle8:08 PM

    "baby-head smell' just brought actual tears to my eyes. Oh, yes, that smell!! Mine are 15, 12, and almost 7 and I'm becoming THAT mom who's on the constant verge of bawling in the grocery store whenever she sees a new mom with a baby in a carseat! thanks for the beautiful piece!

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  6. My oldest is fifteen next month and my baby is creeping up on three, with a ten and twelve between them. I am like a sampler platter of messy mama feels. And yes, I sniff all their heads. As usual, I feel a profuse need to thank you for getting it.

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  7. Oh man, that Mid piece really really got me. such bittersweetness, like the wild plants.

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  8. As commenters do, I was thinking how insightful and new it would be if I mentioned how Ben looks like Michael, but I have been scooped and you surely know anyway. Loved the linked piece although 39 was kind of a decade ago. Shoot.

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  9. Anonymous11:42 PM

    We are having almost daily conversations over here about whether to try for a third baby. We have a 6 and a 3, and things are both getting easier in all the expected ways and the yearning is increasing for just one more helping of the babyness. Plus just the possibility of another person in our family, one more kiddo to watch in wonder. I already feel like your voice in this essay is fine - am I chasing the youth and wonder of the babies or of my own earlier self? I don't know!

    Also, dandelion pesto is wonderful wonderful wonderful; I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't tried it (and thinks, just possibly, that dandelions are a little crazy-bitter in most other forms.)

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    1. Anonymous11:43 PM

      Gah. Your voice in this essay is MINE. I mean, it's fine, too. (:

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  10. Ben and Birdy are shockingly gorgeous. Mine at the same ages are much more in that awkward stage that we all love so much from our own middle school pictures. Unfair. Must be all the wild greens you serve them!

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  11. We have tons of wild plants around us for eating, but I am unsure about chomping through the fennel at the end of our road because it grows in the drainage area where the lawn chemicals from our less eco-conscious neighbors run off. How do you balance the healthy outdoor eating with the decidedly icky settings? Clearly you have some words of wisdom here since you ate plants in Central Park.

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  12. Oh, you beautiful soul. Your piece at themid left me weeping. Thank you!

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  15. I just went over and read your piece at the Mid, and then I clicked on your name and found a bunch more! And at first I was mad that I didn't know about them before (you are not always good at self-promotion (-: , but then again I could have easily just missed the links), but then it quickly changed to that happy-cookie-binge feeling that I got to sit and read them all at once. And this goes without saying at this point, but they made me cry (and laugh, too!). Oh, you!

    -Loren

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  16. Anonymous4:01 PM

    Oh, Catherine-- are you trying to kill me? First you post that beautiful, wrenching piece on babies (and not having them) and then you teach me how to make Hollandaise in 2 minutes? Your posts are wonderful, but dangerous. -Caroline

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