A fresh, crisp salad of shaved lateral rhizomes, smoked trout, lemon and a handful of fresh greens is a cattail recipe I developed (with a little help from Sam Thayer) for an episode of Daniel Vitalis’s show Wild Fed this week. I’d cooked with the lateral rhizomes of cattails (Typha latifolia) before, but it had…
Verdolagas / Purslane
Lots of food happens when the garden gets weeded for purslane.
Verdolagas, also known as purslane, Portulaca oleracea, pirpirim, and other names, is one of the most common garden edible garden weeds I know of, and a great plant to add to your repertoire.
If you're new to this plant, check out my intro guide to verdolagas first, and branch out from there. Hot tip: lots of people like this plant raw, but around the world it's probably served more as a cooked green.
Moroccan Foraged Greens with Preserved Lemon: Bakoula
Bakula, a Moroccan mallow salad also known as Khoubiza or Bakoula, along with Bqula, among other names, is one of the most famous dishes of foraged greens I’ve found, and comes from Morocco. I first read about it while I was going through a research project / academic compilation called “Local Mediterranean Food Plants and Nutruceuticals“-a…
Wild Greek Salad with Purslane and Stonecrop
Midsummer means a lot of things, but heat and garden weeds are probably two that many of us are familiar with right now. A few weeks ago, there was a dinner on the farm I was going to contribute a dish too, and, as my partner’s family is proud of their Greek heritage, I thought…
Purslane, Avocado, and Cucumber Salad
It’s verdolagas / purslane season here, and that means I’m eating it every day, sometimes for two meals a day, mostly in cold salads like this one. I like purslane cooked, but most of the time in the summer when I eat it, I just want to wash it, chop it, and call it a…
Purslane and Sweet Corn Salad
Verdolagas and sweetcorn salad isn’t a traditional Mexican recipe, but it might as well be. An homage to Mexico, and it’s love of quelites, a sort of catch-all term for edible wild plants, it’s a generous dose of the famous edible garden weed mixed with roasted sweet corn, charred tomatoes, and simple Mexican seasonings and…
Verdolagas Guisadas (Braised Purslane)
I love verdolagas / purslane, but until a while ago I hadn’t really thought about cooking it. I knew it was done in some places, but there were a few reasons I didn’t ever entertain cooking it: I was harvesting purslane for a restaurant where I was the chef, and since I was picking it…
Wild Mushroom Tartine with Purslane and Pickled Vegetables
It’s the heart of wild mushroom season in the Midwest, the boom time when you can go to your favorite patch and come home with all sorts of different types. Multiple types of chanterelles, chicken and maybe hen of the woods, Aborted Entoloma, Lactifluus, lobster mushrooms, various black trumpets, coral mushrooms/Ramaria, Hygrophorus, all manner of…
Watermelon Salad With Purslane and Anise Hyssop
Watermelon salad is on plenty of menus in the summer for good reason, it’s cold, refreshing, and evocative of the season. At it’s best it can be paradigm shifting, at it’s worst, it’s nothing more than a glorified fruit salad. While I was in San Francisco this past month, I had one that was basically…
