Lambs quarters
Source of Recipe
Unknown
Recipe Introduction
Pitseed goosefoot, pigweed, fat hen.
List of Ingredients
Young leaves excellent in salads. boiled leaves, (especially young tender ones) taste like mild cabbage.
Collect the seeds (up to 50,000 per plant) and grind for gruel or mush and flour. Roughly grind for a cereal.
Potherb.
Recipe
Notes from June 12, 2011 by Rebecca Lerner;
Lamb’s Quarters, Chenopodium album, is a wild green that contains more calcium than any other plant studied, according to botanist and author John Kallas. It’s also high in protein, vitamin A and vitamin C.
The leaves taste great raw or cooked. Many people compare it to a mild version of spinach. As a member of the Goosefoot family, it is botanically related to that common vegetable, as well as to Swiss chard, quinoa and beets.
Image by B.C. Ministry of Agriculture
Named for its habit of growing in barnyards, Lamb’s Quarters is an ancient food across the world. Anthropologists have recorded its use as a food in Europe as well as in North America by the Eskimo, Hopi, Cherokee and Navajo, and many other groups. A closely related species, Chenopodium berlandieri, is believed to have been one of the first crops ever cultivated on this continent thousands of years ago in the Mississippi basin.
Right now, you can harvest the greens of this plant. Later in the summer you can eat the seeds as a grain.
Look for Lamb’s Quarters growing in direct sunlight in rich, moist patches of soil. I don’t see it much in the local alleyways or roadsides, but it abounds in nature preserves in the city, and gardeners often find it in their planted rows. (I was munching it by the handful on the farm). To identify this plant, look for smooth (not hairy) light green leaves with a high-contrast whitish underside. They grow in an alternate pattern from the stem, which can be anywhere from a few inches high to seven feet tall.
Neat factoid: The leaves are coated with a kind of microscopic powder that makes water droplets bead up and roll off.
Chenopodium album is vulnerable to leaf miners, making it a useful trap crop as a companion plant. Growing near other plants, it attracts leaf miners which might otherwise have attacked the crop to be protected. (Wikipedia, ibid.)
Merriwether
Blanching destroys the naturally-occurring enzymes which break down the cell walls after the plant dies. All plants contain these enzymes and they are slowed down but not stopped by freezing. Blanching prevents these enzymes from functioning so they don’t break down the cell walls so the plants stay preserved (firmer, less mushy) longer.
Ian M
Nice one Becky :)
They call this fella ‘fat hen’ in the UK, apparently because chickens like it lots. PFAF recommend not eating too much of it raw because of the saponin content (removed by cooking or soaking).
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