Or you can coat them with olive oil and put them on the grill.  But Bill has found several patches so vast that even very modest gathering has put us in ramp heaven.

Must be spring - but not for much longer

And as we are also swimming in asparagus, winecaps and morels…

I have now made Pasta with Asparagus and Ramp Hollandaise; Ramp-wrapped Meatloaf; Ramp, Winecap and Ricotta Stuffed Ramp-Wrapped Sole and some quite spiffy Roasted Ramps with Morels and New Potatoes.

Cook’s Note: Ramps are really two vegetables: 1) the tender young first harvest, basically rampscallions – almost evenly thick white stems that gradually become purple as they meet big fans of wide leaves, and 2) the later, more mature version, with a fat oblong bulb, narrow purple neck and the same leaves, now much tougher. The young ones are more strongly oniony on tongue and breath but also sweeter and more complex. Larger bulbs are crunchier until they’re really fat. At the end of the season they can be mealy if cooked whole.

Pasta with Asparagus and Herbed Ramp Hollandaise

Fast and easy. No law against using the sauce on just about anything - or of course garnishing with an herb spring or two if you're not in a rush to shoot, eat, and return to the garden.

For 4 servings:

8 to 10 oz. orecchiette

8 tbl. butter

1 ½ c.  minced young ramps, both stems and leaves

3 egg yolks

2 tsp. lemon or lime juice plus more to taste

2 tbl. minced garlic chives (optional)

@ 1 tbl. each minced fresh marjoram and bronze fennel (optional)

1 to 1 ½  lb. fat asparagus, cut into ½ inch pieces

1. Start the pasta water, then add the pasta as soon as it boils. Melt 2 tbl. of the butter in a small heavy saucepan, add ramps and cook over medium heat just until wilted.

2. Beat yolks with citrus juice in a small, heatproof bowl. When ramps are wilted, add herbs if using and cook about a minute more. Put the rest of the butter in the pan and let it melt and heat.

3. Slowly beat the herb butter into the egg yolks, whisking all the while, then return sauce to the pan and put it over super-low heat. (Put it in a double boiler if your stove has no super-low.) Cook until thickened, stirring constantly, salt to taste, then set aside to keep warm.

4. When the pasta is done, stir the asparagus into the pot with it. Remove a cup of the pasta water, then drain immediately. Return mixture to the pan with ½ cup of the water, cover and let steam until asparagus is done, 2 to 5 minutes. If necessary, stir in just enough of the remaining water to moisten. Serve with the sauce.

Roasted Ramps with Morels and New Potatoes

Or maybe that’s Roasted Morels with Ramps, etc., because there are a lot of morels in this. Suffice it to say using lots of morels is one of the perks of foraging.

(comparatively) slow roasting gives the flavors lots of time to mingle

For 4 servings:

2 tbl. butter

1 tbl. olive oil

1 lb. small new potatoes, rinsed but not dried

8 to 10 oz. firm, clean morels, cut in large pieces (small, very firm cremini are not a substitute but do make a tasty alternative ; use slightly less – 6 oz. or so.

1 to 1 ½ c. mature but not huge ramp bulbs

coarse salt such as Malden salt, to taste

1. Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Put the fats in a small jellyroll pan/ sheet pan and put it in the oven just long enough to melt the butter. Put the wet potatoes in the pan, cover tightly with foil and bake for 15 minutes.

2. Uncover the pan, roll the potatoes around with a spatula, then add the morels and ramps. Return the pan to the oven for 10 minutes. Stir with the spatula again. Repeat until potatoes are very soft and the other vegetables are cooked and starting to brown. This usually takes about ½ hour from uncovering the potatoes but a lot depends on your oven. Sprinkle with the salt and serve.

Endive Wraps with Roasted Vegetables and Chicken

A one-dish dinner, which you can serve as classic meat/starch/veg if your taco-loving husband for some reason looks askance at vegetable wraps.

Good ol' meat and veg

the wrap version (no utensils needed)

For 4 servings:

1 batch of Roasted Ramps with Morels and New Potatoes (above)

½ c. dry vermouth

1/3 c. orange juice

¾ to 1 lb. skinless boneless chicken thighs

12 to 16  broad, mild loose leaf endive leaves – spring loose leaf lettuce that’s about to bolt and has therefore acquired  a bitter edge would be a good substitute

1. While the potato mixture is cooking, choose a shallow pan wide enough to hold the thighs in one layer. Put in the vermouth and juice and add enough water to make the liquid 1 inch deep.

Heat to boiling, add the chicken, cover the pan and lower the heat so liquid barely simmers.

2. Turn the chicken after 5 minutes, give it 5 minutes more and then start testing for doneness.

3. As soon as the meat is barely cooked, remove it and keep warm, covered. Raise the heat under the pan and reduce the cooking liquid to about ¾ cup. Return the meat to the pan and set aside, covered.

4.  When the potato mixture is cooked, scrape it onto a cutting board (or for classic, into a bowl). Pour the chicken liquid into the roasting pan and stir it around with the spatula, picking up all the browned bits. Pour the sauce back into the chicken pan and turn the meat to coat.

5. For classic, you’re done, put a little puddle of sauce on the plate and some of the chicken on it. Fan on a couple of endive leaves, then spoon on some vegetables. For wraps, cut the potatoes in halves or quarters and the chicken in roughly 1 inch chunks. Reheat meat and vegetables in the chicken sauce and serve in a bowl with the leaves on the side.

this is a meatloaf wrapped in ramp leaves and there will be more about it after I go pick up the second batch of tomato seedlings and put them in and prune the hydrangeas and one or two other little things.

Forager Bill meets Gardener Bill in this post about about lambsquarter, one of the all-time great greens. It tastes wonderful (like a cross between asparagus and spinach);  it’s easy to prepare and cook;  it’s good for you – the usual dark green “high in vitamins and minerals, low in calories”  - and as a major bonus, it not only plants itself, it starts so early and grows so fast that you can harvest multiple crops and still have time to  plant tomatoes, corn, squash, beans or whatever in the very same ground.

HALF-WILD GREENS, PART TWO  – LAMBSQUARTER

by Bill Bakaitis

Compared to cultivating ramps, growing lambsquarter in your garden is a snap. In fact, if you don’t know what it is you may already be trying to weed it out. It is considered by some to be  one of the most widespread weeds in the world.

Lambsquarter (Chenopodium album) is probably best thought of as a complex of related plants which intergrade and hybridize quite easily. I find a variety of forms growing in my garden, often changing as the season progresses. You can find one form or another of it growing throughout North America; C. berlandieri was once part of the group of crops grown by the Eastern Woodlands Native Americans.

In Mexico a subspecies (ssp. nuttalliae) and hybrids are still grown as commercial cultivars:  ‘Huauzontle’ for the flowering heads, ‘Chia’ for the seeds, and ‘Quelite’ for the leafy greens. It is sometimes called Pigweed or Goosefoot, and Giant Goosefoot, or ‘Magenta Spreen’, (C.  gigantium) is available from several specialty seed suppliers, including Johnny’s Selected Seeds.

(There is more on species, distribution and taxonomy here and here.

All varieties of Chenopodium seem to be quite prolific, producing panicles that release thousands of tiny seeds, some of which germinate quickly while others persist in the soil for years. This is undoubtedly one reason why these plants are such successful weeds.

Far from being difficult to grow, they are often difficult to eradicate, particularly in soils which are frequently turned. It’s like the many-headed Hydra of Greek Mythology, every time you hoe down the weed, more come up as you expose more seed to sprout. You can see how lambsquarter is a problem when thought of as a weed. Think of it as a delicious green, however, and the problem becomes a blessing, a gift that keeps on giving.

Next to Broccoli Raab, Lambsquarter is my favorite green, but it does have two characteristics that might give you pause the first time you try it.

The first is a grayish, mealy powder found mainly on the underside of the young leaves. This will create an intriguing silvery sheen to the leaf when it is plunged into clear water. The grayish powder, parts of the leaf structure itself, will easily rinse off and rise to the top as a scum. Not to worry, it is harmless.

Equally harmless is the purplish red bloom which will come to dot some of the leaves.

The second aspect of lambsquarter that might cause concern is a flavor characteristic. Best described as a slightly astringent, bitter or mineral quality, it occasionally will leave in the mouth and on the tooth an oxalic acid sensation similar to that produced by rhubarb.

If you or your children do not like spinach, you will not like lambsquarter.  But if your palate has progressed to a more mature level chances are that you will flip over it. Take Lois, for instance. She can’t ever get enough of it. She heads for the greens patch as soon as she gets to the Hudson Valley,  and she continually scours the garden in Maine, laying claim to every plant she can find.

CULTIVATION OF LAMBSQUARTER

Nothing could be simpler. As I build my garden compost piles in the fall, into those beds where I want lambsquarter to grow next year, I incorporate a few mature plants along with the usual horse manure, garden remains, leaves and grass.

In late winter or early spring I turn the piles at my leisure, one every week or two. Before the last frost a thick carpet of two-leafed seedlings will appear, and with the first warm rains of May the tender young plants will be ready to be sheared off with a pair of scissors.

The first cutting is always the best, and the staggered turning of the planting beds, some double dug and turned twice, assures that a “first cutting” will always be available until the heat of summer.

True to its ‘weed’ status, lambsquarter will be found throughout the garden, although beds not treated as described will not be as prolific.

The heaviest harvest often comes just as the asparagus is allowed to go to fern. Large quantities can be cut, placed in storage bags and kept for weeks in the fridge. This green is so delicious and cooperative that it has been years since we have grown spinach.

One final gift of this plant should be mentioned. During the chaos of the early to mid season growth spurt it works very well as a trap plant for aphids.

At first, only a few plants will be affected. When you find one that has growing tips covered with these tiny insects, simply pluck the entire plant and you have captured pests that otherwise would have spread over the whole garden. (Bury infested plants in the compost; the aphids won’t survive.)

HOW TO COOK LAMBSQUARTER:

Again, simplicity itself: Rinse and pick through the greens, discarding any tough stems. (Stems get tougher as plants get older and weather grows hotter.)

I usually blanch the greens for a few minutes, drain and finish by a quick sauté in olive oil.

For a more robust dish, toast a handful of walnuts and a teaspoon of cumin seeds in the olive oil. As they are toasting, but before the oil gets a chance to smoke,  add a clove or two of diced garlic, perhaps a few shallots or a quarter cup of coarsely chopped Vidalia onion, a handful of sun dried tomatoes, and a sprinkling of red pepper flakes.

Play with these as you wish.  A scant teaspoon of Smoked Spanish or Hungarian Paprika will create a perfect and automatic balance among all of the other ingredients.

Add the steamed greens, toss once, and serve immediately with coarse sea salt and fresh crusty bread. You will need nothing else except a glass of red wine.

Or beer, if you make Leslie’s Lambs Quarter Quesadillas.

Quesadillas with lambs quarter, currants, pine nuts, 2 cheeses (and a little hot pepper never hurt anybody either)

Not in the back yard, actually. They’re in the utility area behind the back yard, about 20 feet from the compost heap. The little patch is no more than 30 inches from the path, but it hid in plain sight until a couple of years ago, when Bill the forager added ramps to his must-find collection.

Each year he spends more time tracking them down and eating them up, and now he’s written a guest post guide to them. All I can say is buckle your reading glasses – major ramp treatise ahead.

HALF-WILD GREENS Part I: RAMPS (Allium tricoccum)

by Bill Bakaitis

I grew up knowing the glory of greens.

Before Clarence Birdseye and the magic of flash freezing, spring greens were the first fresh vegetables available to most of us.  Even though my grandmother ran a grocery store and had one of the few freezers in Washington, PA, it was always my grandfather, knife in hand, who would scour the yards and fields for dandelions and bring the first greens to table.

He loved to sauté them in olive oil with a little crushed pepper, mix in a few scrambled eggs, and enjoy them with crusty toast and black coffee. He could do this morning, noon and night if grandma would let him.

They were prosperous, self made Italian immigrants. Their store was on the south side of town, at the intersection of Park Avenue and Main Street. Little by little grandma’s financial skills allowed them to buy nearby houses and land as the properties came on the market.

The house I lived in as a child was purchased from the Hazel-Atlas glass factory during one of the plant expansions and moved across the street, onto an empty lot where granddad and a friend originally had their garden plot.

At times I would accompany my grandfather as he collected greens. It was from him that I learned about water cress and came to gather and market it for our store and several others in the neighborhood.

By this time my grandparents and another family member were able to purchase, for the princely sum of $3,000, a 64 acre farm on the edge of town only a few blocks from the store and our house. This is where I came to learn about the land and the virtues of loosing myself in nature.

It is said that first (or only) born children tend to be very comfortable being alone. I certainly made the most of the farm and surrounding forests coming to know nature well and coming easily and naturally to the world of foraging.

As I say, I grew up knowing well the glory of greens, and yet somehow never collected ramps. I doubt that they were missing from the limestone hills of southwest Pennsylvania, and I knew my Italian grandparents loved both greens and garlic, so it is a bit of a mystery to me as to why and how they were absent from my early foraging experience.

Of course I had heard of ramps, knowing they were a springtime staple of southern Appalachian rural folk. Medicinal too, I had heard, probably in the same way that almost any springtime green is to those who suffer the long winters without fresh vegetables. In Pennsylvania it was not only dandelion and water cress, but also mustards and lambsquarter that filled the bill for a spring tonic and cleanser.

Even as an adult I thought ramps were restricted to areas well below the Mason-Dixon Line. I now know better and have Ken Kleinpeter to thank for correcting me. (Ramps grow from Alabama nearly to the Arctic.)

Ken is a Louisianan by birth, a long time sheep tender, cheese maker, dairyman, and now farm manager for Glynwood Estates, near Fahnstock Park in the Hudson Valley of New York. A few years ago as he and I went out looking for morels, he mentioned collecting ramps near the farm he manages, and he pointed them out to me several times during the day as we roamed the back roads searching for likely looking morel habitats.

By the end of the day we had collections of both morels and ramps in our baskets. At the dinner table it was hard to tell which one was better, and I was convinced that for all of those years prior I had been missing out on a great deal.

It was only after this trip with Ken that I noticed the ramps growing in my own back yard.  I have been on the lookout for them in other places ever since.  Here is what I have discovered.

HUNTING FOR RAMPS

In the Hudson Valley ramps do not seem to be terribly common, but when I find them they are often locally abundant. This may be due to the fact that they have not been widely collected in the places where they grow so I am quite careful to take only a few from each place I find them, leaving the rest to grow and spread their seed.

Ramps are very slow growing and in places where heavy collecting has occurred it has taken many years for the population of plants to recover. Collection of ramps in the Smoky Mountain National Park, for example, was banned in 2002 for just this reason and is now being heavily regulated.

Ramps seem to be confined to deep hillside forests, often on a north facing slope, and on well shaded floodplains where there is ample organic material in the soil.

I have not found them in mucky soil, but transitional areas of sandy loam where the Skunk Cabbage meets the Trout Lily seem to be areas worth investigating.  Quite often I also find Red Trillium, Dutchman’s Breeches, and Bloodroot scattered among the ramps.

Mature ramps will have two or three  2″ x 10″ shiny green leaves arising from a common purplish stem which fades underground into a white elongated bulb; The deeper the soil, the deeper the bulb. Some in sandy flood plains will have their roots six to eight inches below the surface.

Ramps tend to grow in clusters and will have a strong garlic odor.  Once lifted from the soil an easy to peel, mucilaginous, cellophane-like sheath will be seen covering the stem base and bulb.

In the mid-Hudson area, the green shoots will emerge from the soil in April, before the trees leaf out. A single flowering stem with a whitish ball of florets appears six weeks later as the tree canopy leafs out and closes over.

By this time the leaves of the ramps will have died back, their month long greening season over. The head of black seeds seem to be released in stages. Some can still be found in the straw-colored dried seed head in the spring of the following year.

The clustering habit of ramps seems to come primarily from the seeds. One can often find young ramps in slender almost thread-like sprays scattered here and there among the clusters of mature plants. Propagation from seed is difficult, as they require a prolonged, two-stage germination process, but is one way ramps are commercially cultivated.

LOOK-ALIKES

There are three or four plants which might be confused with ramps. Of these, the first two, Lily of the Valley and Trout Lily, like ramps, are small two – leafed members (or relatives) of the Lily Family.

Lily of the Valley (Convallaria majalis) is the relative recently moved from the Liliaceae to the Ruscacae. It stands more erect than ramps,  rising from small pips in the early spring and forming dense colonies,  members of which are connected by a fibrous underground network of rhizomes.

By the end of April the mature two-leaved plants will send up a single erect raceme of 10 to 15, usually white, bell shaped flowers. These will smell just like your Grandmothers Lily of the Valley Cold Cream.

There are many cultivars and although in the past it was used in traditional herbal medicine as both a cure for memory loss and as an aid to induce “common sense” all parts of this plant are now known to be highly poisonous.

Trout Lilly (Erythronium americanum) is also called Adders Tongue or Dog Tooth Violet. Like ramps it will often grow in spreading troops, with plants of varying size.

Young plants will usually have but one leaf whereas mature plants will usually have two. The leaves are much smaller than ramps (1″x 4″), are deeply mottled, and will often send up a single yellow nodding flower. Peterson lists it as edible but acknowledges it is also known to be an active emetic, inducing vomit.

Mature specimens of the Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) would not be mistaken for ramps due to the large size of the ovate leaves, up to a foot in diameter. Young Skunk Cabbage, however,  has 3″x 6″ leaves that more closely resemble the 2″ x 10″ elongated leaves of ramps.

The clearly veined leaves and ’skunky’ odor of the crushed plant however will quickly serve to identify this fleshy herb which contains toxic calcium oxalate crystals.

One bite of this plant, even if well cooked, will cause the mouth and throat to burn and swell up. This is the same compound that makes the green parts of rhubarb and dumbcane (Dieffenbachia ) so poisonous.

Growing in the same location as Skunk Cabbage is False Hellibore (Veratrum viride) a quite toxic member of the Lilly family. It is much more robust than even Skunk Cabbage and quickly develops an erect stem with heavily ribbed, spirally arranged leaves.  I can’t imagine anyone mistaking this plant for Ramps, but then again ‘common sense’ often presents itself as a toxic brew!

PREPARING RAMPS FOR THE KITCHEN

Ramps are very easy to prepare. Place them in a bowl of water and rinse the dirt from the roots. This will also loosen the membrane which covers the stem and bulb. Slide the membrane off, do a final rinse and you are done.

In the fridge they will store quite easily in a plastic bag, or loosely wrapped in a wet towel.

COOKING WITH RAMPS

A  Google search will turn up dozens of ways to cook with these wild leeks. Some call for mixing them with scrambled eggs, as Grandpa Cario did with dandelion. Others recommend a simple potato-ramp soup.For the sophisticated there is Asparagus braised or grilled with Ramp Aioli.

Recipes galore await your search, more than you can possibly attempt in the short season when Ramps are available.

My favorite, and perhaps the easiest, is to coarsely chop the greens along with the bulbs and sauté in olive oil. You can play around, adding perhaps a garlic clove or shallot, thinly sliced red Bell Pepper, or a sprinkling of red pepper flakes. When done, toss with pasta or serve over grilled vegetables.

You can’t go wrong. The complex flavor is subtle yet intense, sweetish on the tongue with lots of garlic in the nose. Down south it is said that if you eat them alone, you will stay alone for no one will want to be near you.  The solution to this is simple, dine together and rinse with a soft red wine.

CULTIVATING RAMPS

Since the ramps grow wild in my back yard, I have taken to expanding this local crop by transplanting a few plants with each collection I make from the wild.

These have been planted only in the very shady parts of the yard, the tree-lined margins where conditions are similar to those in the deep forest.

Studies conducted by plant scientists indicate that the seeds normally need two seasons to fully germinate, that planting the seeds in the fall usually produces better results than spring planting, and that amending the soil with calcium increases the vigor and eventual harvest of the plants.

A quick planting guide may be found here. For a more detailed booklet and source for seeds and bulbs click here.

Much like planting asparagus, this is a gardening exercise for the future. Anticipation, patience and prudence are the names of the game.

If you need results more quickly, consider the cultivation of half-wild lambsquarter, details coming in part 2 of this series.

This foragers’ favorite doesn’t appear until mid-spring, roughly in synch with the morels, but it’s never too early to get ready for collecting.

Pasta with fiddleheads, morels and garlic chives

After asking if the ostrich fern was indeed the right one to eat, Louisa continued “I was also told that fiddleheads actually aren’t the best thing nutritionally for humans. Having lived in the country in Japan, part of the pleasure of spring is rejoicing in the flavors of renewal represented by the fiddlehead with a touch of soy. Would you know if nutritionally this is a good or bad thing? …”

Happy to say I do know. This pleasure of spring renewal has been finding its way to my own plate for several decades now, and questions about it were perennials when I was answering garden questions for the New York Times.

Ostrich fern, Matteuccia struthiopteris, fiddleheads rising

Drawing by Bobbi Angell, award winning illustrator for the New York Botanical Garden (among many others) and my long-time friendly collaborator at the Times.

Nutritionally, fiddleheads are your basic dark green veg – reasonably high in vitamins A and C, rich with assorted minerals and low in calories. The “bad thing” part is that they contain compounds (not yet identified) that can cause severe gastric distress if not neutralized by thorough cooking.

Nobody seems to have noticed this in the old days, when the accepted way to cook wild greens was to boil them a while, throw out the water, then boil them some more. But when they started being lightly stir-fried and even – bad idea! – served raw, reports of unhappy reactions began to show up with some regularity.

As long as you cook them well, ostrich ferns should present no problems. Just be sure you have the ID right. Many other ferns are carcinogenic, including bracken fern, Pteridium aquilinum, which is eaten all over Asia, especially in Korea and Japan, and cinnamon fern, Osmunda cinnamomea, often described in vintage field guides as “edible, but of poor  quality.”

FINDING THE RIGHT FERN

It isn’t enough to look for “fiddleheads,” young fronds that are tightly coiled like the top of a violin or a bishop’s crosier. The boggy terrain favored by ostrich ferns supports a whole orchestra of species that start out this way. Be sure to pick only the ones that have smooth stems with a groove down the inside and papery brown scales that are easy to rub off.

Also be sure you don’t pick more than a third of any one clump. And use common sense – to the extent you can – about safe habitat. Ferns growing near industrial sites and dumps laced with heavy metals are better admired in the vase than on the end of a fork.

The University of Maine offers a nice fiddlehead  fact sheet that includes recipes. Extensive botanical lowdown, with habitat description and links to even greater detail, is at the Hardy Fern Library; and you can check out the economic botany angle here.

SHOPPING FOR FIDDLEHEADS

In season, in Maine and maritime Canada (and high-end greengrocers all over the US), there are fiddleheads for sale, usually at lower prices than those commanded by most wild foods. Select as you would select asparagus: coils should be tight and firm, there should be little or no damage where scales have rubbed off and cut ends should be fresh-looking, not browned, dried out and/or split.

Fiddleheads should be refrigerated as soon as possible after picking and kept cold thereafter, but small-town stores and roadside vendors usually just display them in open baskets wherever there’s room for the baskets to be. This is seldom a problem – local sellers are very close to the fiddleheads’ haunts and they’re moving the product so quickly it doesn’t have time to get sad.

A common sight in Maine in the Spring

Bill took this picture a couple of years ago at Fales Store (founded in 1829), our town’s wonderful one and only, without which we would all perish promptly. The golden blades at right are the tails of alewives custom smoked for the store by 6th generation proprietor John Fales.

COOKING FIDDLEHEADS

As noted above, cooking them thoroughly is essential, but that doesn’t mean you have to cook them to death. Fifteen minutes of steaming will do the trick, but I prefer to blanch them in a big pot of boiling salted water for 2 minutes, drain and rinse, then proceed as though they were asparagus. The flavor is different but similarly mineral green and, like that of asparagus, occasionally rather flat. (Try adding a pinch of sugar if they taste kind of blah.)

The other known vegetable they resemble is long beans, in that “lightly cooked” does them no favors gastronomically, so you’re really not missing anything by being sure they’re ok.

Cultivated strawberries are easy to grow, almost always tasty and sometimes very tasty. But none of them – yet; I keep trying – are as good as genuinely wild strawberries (F. virginiana), the intensely flavorful, amazingly aromatic gift that grows freely in woodland edges all over the northeast and beyond.

 Unfortunately, as many before me have discovered, you can bring the strawberry into the garden but you can’t bring the garden into the strawberry.

Horticultural reason suggests that selecting the plants that bear the largest quantity of the largest fruit and giving them good soil, adequate water and filtered sunshine ought to lead, gradually, to better crops than could be gathered on any summer visit to a good picking spot. 

It doesn’t, no matter how many times you try. In this frustrating bit of poetic justice F. virgiania is completely democratic – anyone who bothers to pick them gets the same splendid reward: the very best strawberry in existence, in ( nothing is completely free) the very smallest package.

Clockwise from top: local garden strawberry from u-pick operation, variety unknown; true wild strawberry, from up the road; Mignonette, from the garden; Pineapple, a “white”  alpine (supposedly less attractive to birds) that has gone wild in the side yard; and one of the u-pick strawberries standing in for the size of a Tristar because right now our chipmunk-in-Tristar- patch problem has reached crisis proportions.

More on Alpines: my relationship with alpines and the rarer but also much praised hautbois is one of those love/hate deals. On the plus side, they’re falling-down-easy to grow, long lived and pretty… and you get all kinds of gourmet points for having them. On the down side they take forever to pick while being far less wonderful than you’d think from all the hoopla. At least that’s how they strike me. For the opposing viewpoint  - and a very large selection of seeds and plants – check out Alpine Strawberries.

NO! dammit. Dandelions are the first vegetable of spring, or rather they are the first green vegetable. Parsnips that have overwintered (” spring dugs”) are even earlier, but by spring one has had enough roots for a while no matter how sweet they may be.

What dandelions are: delicious. Tender and fresh-tasting, with a pleasantly bitter endive edge and an earthy greenness that has no analogy. They’re low in calories, high in vitamin A , lutein and beta-carotene – look out carrots, you’ve got competition – and absolutely free.

What dandelions are not: instant. On account of the picking and cleaning. But picking is pleasant, a good chance to get outside, and a great activity to share with kids; anybody over about 3 knows what a dandelion looks like. And cleaning goes fairly quickly if you use the greens washing trick that works for anything wrinkled and sandy.
Cooking takes about 5 minutes, so once you’ve got cleaned greens you’ve got fast food.

Greens must be gathered before the flower bud starts pushing up or they will be tough and unpleasantly bitter. Greens from shady places (left) are usually wider, flatter, and milder than greens grown in full sun (right)

Mediterranean Dandelions with olive oil, garlic and lemon.

Fine hot or cold as a vegetable dish, easily expanded into Dandelions with Pasta and Prosciutto, a one-dish supper for spring. Measurements are given mostly for the form of the thing. Please for the love of heaven don’t bother to follow them to the letter.

For 4 servings:

a basketball-sized heap of cleaned dandelion greens, well drained but not dried:

¼ cup olive oil

3 large cloves garlic, minced

2 tablespoons lemon juice; about half a lemon if it’s a decent lemon

salt to taste

Heat the oil in a wide sauté pan over medium-high heat. Add garlic and sizzle until pale gold. Add greens, standing back to avoid the spatter when water hits the hot oil. Stir, cover, turn heat to medium low. Cook about a minute, stir again, recover and cook 2 or 3 minutes more. As soon as they’re all wilted, they’re done.

Dandelions with Pasta and Prosciutto

For 4 servings:

6 ounces thick pasta ( about 2 ½ cups dry)

1/3 cup olive oil

4 or 5 large cloves garlic

about 2/3 cup prosciutto, cut into small dice. *

¼ cup currants

3 tablespoons lemon juice

1 batch cleaned dandelions ( see above)

lemon wedges

Hard grating cheese to accompany **

Get the pasta cooking. When it’s about half done, heat the oil in a wide skillet, sizzle the garlic and prosciutto dice until both start to brown on the edges. Stir in the currants, cover and turn off the heat.

When the pasta is barely cooked, stir the dandelions into the pasta pot. They will wilt instantly. Drain at once and return to the pot. Stir in the prosciutto mixture , taste, add salt if necessary and serve garnished with lemon wedges. Pass the cheese and a grater at the table.

* We use “prosciutto ends,” the bit at the tip that’s too small to slice neatly, chunks our local market obligingly sells at a bargain price. Failing that, start with a single thick slab roughly 1/3 inch thick or substitute some other strong-flavored ham. It won’t taste the same, but it won’t taste bad. Or switch gears completely and use toasted pine nuts instead of the meat.

** last time I made this we used Magic Mountain, a sheep cheese from Woodcock Farm, in Vermont. Parmesan is fine, but why not experiment with alternatives made closer to home? The American Cheese Society has accomplished members in almost every state.

But there are the world’s best strawberries, tiny wild strawberries, Fragaria virginiana, the ones that Roger Williams was talking about when he said, in 1643 “…this berry is the wonder of all fruits growing naturally in these parts. It is of itself excellent so that one of the chiefest doctors of England was wont to say, that God could have made, but never did make a better berry. …”

Still true – and one of the wonderful things about them is their subtle variation: color, shape and sweetness all depending on the soil, the shade, the weather of the season. Always delicious but never predictable, the best are so intensely fragrant it takes just a handful to lift a whole quart of garden berries into the sublime.

A mercy, that, because picking wild strawberries is – let us not say a pain – but certainly not a task for the time pressed. The biggest one I’ve ever found was about the size of a nickel, though plumper, and you do have to know a good spot; thickly carpeted with plants – each one bears just a few fruits – and undercarpeted with grass, leaves or some other barrier to sand and dirt. (washing any strawberry is bad, washing the wild ones is criminal – and usually ineffective. )

It would be easier if you could move some into the garden, but for some reason you can’t. Or rather, you can move the plants; but they will remain just as shy bearing and the fruit won’t taste the same.
Enter fraises de bois, wood strawberries, F. vesca, often called wild strawberries by the wishful thinkers who write menus. Slightly larger than the wild ones and very easy to grow in gardens, they are dependably delicious — if you believe the catalogs.

Over the years, I’ve grown several varieties, including Alexandra and Baron Solemacher, each of which is often touted as tastiest. Every one of them, to a strawberry, tasted exactly like fake grape flavoring – the kind in cheap candy and gum. ( should say they taste the way this flavor smells on the breaths of others. I must have consumed some when a child but that was quite a while ago).

I am not alone in this opinion. A brief supporting quote – from Eleanor Pereny’s garden classic, Green Thoughts, is on the May 4th podcast from Virtual Hudson Valley.
Perenyi, who attributes the whole fraise de bois phenom to savvy marketing, starts out by quoting Alice B. Toklas, another authority to be reckoned with: ” The small strawberries, called by the French wood strawberries, are not wild but cultivated. It took me an hour to gather a small basket for Gertrude Stein’s breakfast, and later when there was a plantation of them in the upper garden our young guests were told that if they cared to eat them, they should do the picking themselves.”

I wouldn’t add these words (from The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook) if it weren’t for the next paragraph, forgotten until I went back to find the strawberries:

” The first gathering in the garden in May of Salads, radishes and herbs made me feel like a mother about her baby – how could anything so beautiful be mine. And this emotion of wonder filled me for each vegetable as it was gathered every year. There is nothing that is comparable to it, as satisfactory or as thrilling, as gathering the vegetables one has grown.”

(Green Thoughts and Ms. Toklas’ Cookbook have languished out of print from time to time but both are now readily available as inexpensive paperbacks..)

Well, okay. Not the best argument for home cooking. But a GREAT example of great food close to home. Dandelions are everywhere, first green of the season. They’re delicious (like endive, only more so) and almost obscenely good for you : tons of vitamin A, quantities of B complex, C, and D, plus iron, potassium, and zinc.

To say nothing of absolutely free,

BULLETIN: Just looked out at the feeder. The goldfinches are golden again, drab winter plumage all gone.

WILTED DANDELIONS

This is the way I learned to love them when I was a kid in Pennsylvania Dutch country. Italians have other ideas, which will be addressed another time.

For about 4 to 6 side dish servings or dinner for 2

A good sized heap – half a brown paper grocery bag full – of young dandelions ( see below) or other bitter greens, washed and coarsely chopped

½ pound bacon

1/3 cup cider vinegar

1/3 cup water

3 or 4 tablespoons brown sugar

Several turns of the pepper mill

A bit of minced garlic is not authentic but is tasty

2 hardboiled eggs

1. Let the greens come to room temperature in a large, heatproof bowl. Cook the bacon in a heavy skillet over low heat until very crisp.

2. Set the bacon aside to drain and pour off all but about 1/3 cup of the bacon fat. Put the pan aside, off the heat. Crumble the bacon and slice the eggs thinly.

3. Add the vinegar, water, sugar , pepper (and garlic) to the skillet and bring the mixture to a simmer, stirring to dissolve the sugar. When sugar is dissolved, bring dressing to a rolling boil and pour it over the greens. Toss thoroughly. Garnish with bacon and hard egg and serve.

(If the season is almost over and the greens are on the serious side, cook them briefly in the dressing … just until wilted.)

To Harvest and Clean Dandelions:

Size doesn’t matter – the older the root, the larger the rosette of leaves – but youth is crucial: go for plants with small, tight flowerbuds buried in the center. Once buds start swelling, greens turn bitter and tough.

Cut the rosette at ground level. Discard any discolored leaves and trim off the dirt-covered base before dropping the rest in your bag or basket.

Separate leaves and chop coarsely, then dump in a large bowl of cool water. Swish ‘em around, then lift into a colander. Discard sandy water in bowl. Repeat until no more sand comes out. It almost always takes 3 passes and often takes more .

(Taste a leaf, bearing in mind that the dressing will gentle them quite a bit. If they still seem mindbendingly bitter, let them soak in cool water for an hour or two). Drain so they’re not sopping wet but don’t worry about drying them.