Eat Your Greens by Shelley Lance
This is the time of year I get impatient for Spring. I’m ready with bags of compost for the vegetable garden bed and fat brown envelopes of mail order seeds from Cook’s Garden and John Scheepers, but the weather isn’t ready for me. Since I haven’t had the chance to plant my arugula, mache, peas, and mesclun mix, I’m yearning for something fresh and green to eat instead- something really vibrant, maybe even a little bitter. A real spring tonic full of vitamins! Two recipes caught my eye in the food sections yesterday. Mark Bittman’s recipe for mashed potatoes with greens in the New York Times calls for equal parts potatoes and dandelion greens, mashed together with olive oil then topped with bread crumbs and baked. Sounds fabulous! Russ Parsons of the Los Angeles Times has a recipe for a spring greens soup where the greens are cooked with onions, garlic, and stock, then the mixture is pureed, cooked pasta shapes are added, and Parmesan is grated over the top. Again, sounds like perfect spring deliciousness! Russ also uses dandelion greens in his recipe, but he warns against too many dandelions because they’re bitter. Plus, he has a funny story about how he almost ruined the soup he was making for a dinner party since it turned out both too salty and too bitter, and he shares the thought processes he went through figuring out how to save the soup (and the party). This is nicely instructive, since we all have our kitchen disasters and it’s good to have some fixes up our sleeves. (By the way, Mark Bittman’s tip to tame the bitterness of dandelion greens– he blanches them and throws out the blanching water.) Two recipes with dandelions that sound really good to me, hmmmm…. maybe it’s not too late to put in another quick order to the seed companies. Some people think it’s crazy to plant dandelions- don’t they come up by themselves in the lawn? But the seed varieties you can buy are tastier (here’s an example) plus it’s much handier to have a crop of same-sized leaves to cut than forage all around for them. There’s no big danger in planting dandelions, just be sure to pull up the whole row or bed well before they flower and go to seed.
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