Spring's Wild Salad

Fresh Picked Dandelion Greens

The name of this blog, comes from the fact that when I created the blog address, I was eating a dinner of pasta with a blanched dandelion leaf sauce. Dandelions are a pretty amazing plant, containing high levels of vitamins and nutrients. From nutritiondata.self.com: 

"This food is low in Saturated Fat, and very low in Cholesterol. It is also a good source of Folate, Magnesium, Phosphorus and Copper, and a very good source of Dietary Fiber, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Vitamin E (Alpha Tocopherol), Vitamin K, Thiamin, Riboflavin, Vitamin B6, Calcium, Iron, Potassium and Manganese."

I had intended for the first post to be on how to collect and prepare dandelion greens, but alas, my camera did not cooperate for the photos. Today I went collecting for the second time this spring. Dandelion greens are best collected when they are young, between late April and mid-may. Afterwards the raw greens get quite tough and bitter. They can still be okay cooked throughout the summer, but the spring greens are best. (Different parts of the plant have other uses, such as the roots and flowers, at other times of the year, I'll cover this in future blog posts.) Ideally you want to collect your plants where there have been no pesticides sprayed, and the ground is fairly clean, no concentrated livestock or pets, or not so nice run-off. I am lucky, I have a huge farmyard, in which the lawn is not maintained, to gather from. That means no sprays and lots of 'weeds'.

This is today' harvest. Now that I have gathered the leaves, I prep and store them for quick and easy use in meals. First I wash the leaves in ice water, then snap off any stem that goes past the leaves, and transfer to another bowl.

I bring some water to the boil, drop the leaves in to blanch, turn off the heat, let sit for a minute or so till the leaves are soft, and strain, keeping the liquid (see below). Then I place the cooked leaves into an ice cube tray. This freezes them into easy to use blocks. Once frozen I take the dandelion cubes out of the tray, and store in the freezer in a zip lock bag. This way I can easily add this nutritious veggie to my dinners any time.

Frozen Single Serve Portions
Great to Pop Into a  Pasta or Stir Fry

As for the juice left over from cooking the leaves, add a generous amount of honey, a touch of lemon, and serve over ice for delicious dandelion lemonade.