California Is for Foragers

I dodged Seattle's Snowpacalypse 2012 for a week in NorCal, fleeing back home just as the volley of storms continued south and transformed the Chetco, Smith, and other coastal rivers into angry brown torrents. This was a "working vacation" spent gathering material for the next book, but it was also an excuse to see some of the best that the region has to offer.

In a brief week I managed to pack in three redwood hikes, including an amazing 12-mile loop through the Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park that took me out to a lonely Pacific beach where my footprints were the only human presence for miles, and another in Jedediah State Park in a windy downpour that dumped lichens and branches down upon me besides the rain.

The redwoods earn all their accustomed superlatives and more. I recommend a winter visit when you can be alone among the thousand-year-old trees and contemplate the forces that bequeathed us a mere one percent of the original ancient forest. Talk about one-percenter.

I joined a wild harvester friend of mine for winter pick on the Lost Coast (pictured at top), where we gathered 25 pounds of watercress from a pristine spring, the season's first greens. (I've been eating a salubrious watercress salad pretty much every day since then.) Stinging nettles and miner's lettuce were just beginning to hit their stride at this latitude.

My friend calls the old-growth redwood forest "bad medicine," an expression he picked up from a local Indian man. If you're a mushroom picker, this is no doubt true—not much in the way of commercial mushrooms grows beneath the world's tallest trees besides the odd hedgehog here and there. On the other hand—and this is one of the great ironies of the trade—the cutover redwood forests are filled with, not surprisingly, redwood decay, and where there is decay there is fungus. Hundred-year-old stumps as big as Volkswagen bugs now fill woods mostly shaded by tanoak, madrone, and Douglas-fir. Mushrooms that prefer this decay include bellybutton hedgehogs and yellowfoot chanterelles. But even better, in this mycophagist's opinion, is a species that seems to be mycorrhizal with the deciduous trees and yet needs some of that redwood decay to really prosper: the black trumpet (Craterellus cornucopioides).

It's not a good year in NorCal for winter pick. Those weeks of high winter barometer up and down the Pacific Northwest conspired to stunt the fruiting of mushrooms. Places that one might expect to be loaded with fungi are strangely bare. It remains to be seen whether the recent storms can reverse the trend. Pickers I spoke to in the Brookings area just over the border figured that the late rain would actually put an end to their season, but farther to the south the effects may be the opposite. I can say that I found quite a few babies in one upland patch in Humboldt that will certainly be flourishing in a couple weeks.



Back home I returned to a fridge filled with half-finished stuff. Such unappreciated riches shouldn't be thought of as a burden. The dog's breakfast is perfect way to get creative in the kitchen, and sometimes you make something unexpected and delicious that becomes part of the regular repertoire. A quick inventory revealed a partially eaten package of prosciutto, two Italian sausages, a corner of parmesan, and a big yogurt container filled with an accumulation of leftover diced tomatoes. What a bonanza!

With the tomatoes I made a simple red sauce with garlic and olive oil and let this simmer for an hour, adding water occasionally as it thickened. I sliced the prosciutto (about two ounces) into strips and crumbled the sausage, browning both in a little olive oil. To this I added two huge handfuls of black trumpet mushrooms. Meanwhile I brought a pot of water to boil and add a pound of pappardelle. Just before the pasta was cooked, I added two handfuls of stemmed watercress to the meat-and-mushroom mixture and allowed it to wilt. The plated pasta got a ladleful of red sauce and a few spoonfuls of the meat-mushroom-watercress. Shavings of parm added the finishing touch.

Angel Dust

You hear the same old quote repeated endlessly about fennel pollen, something about the sprinkling of spice from the wings of angels. Let's just call it angel dust. You remember that stuff from late-night cop movies—a drug that made users goofy and totally out of their heads. Like truffles, saffron, and a handful of other exotic, pricey, and painstakingly harvested goodies, fennel pollen enjoys the same reputation in certain quarters.

I happened on a patch of wild fennel in late July when I was scouting locations for a class on urban foraging, part of a summer course offered by Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle called "The Art of Food." I was looking for ripening blackberry bushes in the downtown core when I saw these towering thickets of yellow blooms adjacent to a parking lot in the International District. Sure enough, the blooms—some of them several feet high and buzzing with bees—turned out to be wild fennel plants.

Who knows how they got here. They might have been planted on purpose long ago by Italian immigrants who populated my own nearby neighborhood in Rainier Valley, when small agricultural plots still existed within the city limits, a place fondly remembered as Garlic Gulch. Fennel is technically a weed in this country but it's native to the Mediterranean and has always been a favorite vegetable and spice of Greek, Italian, and other culinary traditions from that region.

I don't have much experience with fennel pollen. I've eaten meats dusted with it in restaurants and that's about it. In my car I found a pair of scissors and some paper grocery bags (always useful to have nearby) and set to work. Basically I just looked for the best blooms and snipped them at the stem right below the flower head. It didn't take long to collect two full grocery bags of flowers. These I bunched together with the blooms facing down into the bag, stems tied. For the next several days I allowed the flowers to drop their tiny orange pellets of pollen and occasionally gave the bags a shake to speed the process along, a tip I gleaned from this article.  By the end of the week I had accumulated about three tablespoons of the stuff. That's not a typo: 3 tbsp! Go crazy, huh.

The thing of it is, though, you don't need much fennel pollen to jazz up a cut of meat or add an ineffable savoriness to vegetables. For my first try I used a couple teaspoons with pork chops (considered a classic combo in the Old Country) on a bed of sauteed broccoli from the garden. I rolled the fatty end of the chops in the pollen before grilling, then dusted the remnants on the broccoli as it cooked in the pan. One of the chops—the control—was left untreated as a comparison.

I can say that the pollen added an almost sweet dimension to the pork chops with its hint of anise, though in this forager's opinion it was the broccoli that really shined; somehow that fennel fairy dusting gave the veggies a brightness, an aliveness, that they otherwise would have lacked. The rest of my pollen, all two-plus tablespoons, went into a spice jar, awaiting the next experiment. While I don't expect to become an angel dust junkie anytime soon, you know what they say about pollen being a gateway drug...

Purslane Salad

The best things in life are free—and easy. Take this weed salad that uses purslane as the featured ingredient. It's delicious in inverse proportion to the time and skill required to make it. Which is to say it's really good and really simple.

First, a word about weeds. You've heard me extol their virtues before. If you're still a non-believer that weeds can save the world, I insist you try this recipe. Most Americans are busy pulling purslane (Portulaca oleracea—same family as miner's lettuce) right now if they're thinking about it at all—and pulling their hair out, too, because like Himalayan blackberry purslane can never be vanquished. But it can be eaten. 

Here's what you do. Pick a bunch of purslane, stem it (making sure to keep many of the leaf clusters intact), and toss it with a chopped sweet onion such as a Walla Walla and a large ripe heirloom tomato. That's it. Season with salt and pepper and allow the tomato juice to form the dressing; squeeze a chunk of tomato into the salad if necessary to get the juices flowing.

You'll be amazed by the results. Purslane has a crunchy texture and a complex flavor that marries perfectly with the acidic tomato juice and sweetness of the onion. Jon Rowley turned me onto this salad last summer at an oyster fest and we ate it again the other day when I dropped by his house to pilfer a few of the shoots for my own garden. 

That's right, I'm planting weeds!

Dandelion Jelly

After reading Ava Chin's Urban Forager column in the New York Times the other day I was inspired to make Dandelion Jelly.

This has been in the back of my mind for a while but I always seem to have some other use for the hard-won yellow petals: bread or muffins or wine. And it's not like one just has flowers to burn (despite what my neighbors think about my "lawn"). Harvesting the petals is definitely not in the same league as plucking a few leaves for a salad or buds for an omelet. It's a commitment. Luckily I went a little overboard during my wine-making foray, collecting a cool eight cups of petals rather than the six cups the recipe called for—giving me exactly the two cups needed for Ms. Chin's recipe.

Always the pranksters, the dandelions weren't done with me yet. My unruly petals refused to submit placidly to the domestic arts. On the first go-round the jelly didn't want to set, resulting in a syrup instead. The next day I poured all the syrup back into the pot and added 4 more teaspoons of pectin. This did the trick, though I lost a significant quantity cooking down the syrup and even then I wasn't convinced it would set. But after returning from Olympia that night (which is like a trip in the Wayback Machine to the Seattle of 20 years ago, pre-tech boom, pre-Starbucks, pre-WTO but definitely not pre-grungewear or pre-dive bar...I liked it) I discovered that my measly 3/4 of a pint had set most gracefully.

The flavor is really quite wonderful. It's kind of like a gelified honey. (Did I make up that word? Apparently not.) After enjoying—no, gobbling down—my first taste of gelified honey aka dandelion jelly on an organic wheat English muffin, I felt like one of those drunken bumblebees you see in the dandelion fields. There was nothing to do but flop down and take a mid-morning nap.

Here's the recipe, with the caveat that your mileage may vary. Don't forget: pectin is your friend when it comes to Dandelion Jelly.

2 cups dandelion petals
2 cups water
1 cup sugar
2 tsp lemon juice
2-4 tsp pectin*

* Maybe more, maybe less. This jelly operates on principles beyond our ken.

1. Bring 2 cups water to boil and add dandelions. Boil 10 minutes over medium heat.
2. Strain dandelions and return liquid to pot.
3. Add sugar, lemon, and pectin, then bring to boil again before reducing heat to a simmer. Stir with wooden spoon until syrupy. This may take little time or lots of time, depending.
4. Pour into sterilized jars, seal, and process in hot water bath for 10 minutes.

Yields about a pint.

A Dandy Day in the Neighborhood

This post is featured in Volume 7 of the Good Life Report. Subscribe here.

Ray Bradbury famously waxed nostalgic about his family's love of dandelion wine. The story first appeared in Gourmet magazine and conjured a mostly lost bucolic America where everyone owned a wine press and the hated weed of today was thought of in much gentler terms. Bottled sunshine he called the tonic they made in the cellar. Even though dandelions are predominantly harvested in spring, the writing evokes thoughts of endless summer days, backyard baseball games, and kids with fishing poles riding bikes down to the local pond—the sort of stuff our current crop of post-structuralists might call a simulacra.

Sometimes I think I caught the tail end of that America in my own childhood, when there were still woodlots to roam near my family's home and fireflies lit up the nighttime sky. Now most of us live in planned communities or the city. It's paved. It's crowded. But there are still plenty of dandelions.

The other day I went looking for six cups worth of the jaunty yellow petals in order to make wine. I started in my own tiny backyard, picking every one in sight. Then the front yard and down the block. Soon I was in front of the local elementary school, where last year I struck a bonanza of dandies, but a groundskeeper had already beat me to it with his John Deere. I continued on toward busy Rainier Avenue, once the gathering arterial for Italian immigrants in Seattle. They called the Rainier Valley "Garlic Gulch" back then. Now, after several successions, it's largely Southeast Asian.

I walked through the community garden and found some beautiful bloomers. A middle-aged Laotian woman tilling her plot wanted to know what I was up to. I explained the culinary and medicinal benefits of Taraxacum officinale, how it's much more nutritious than virtually anything we can grow ourselves, and she pointed me toward a burned-out husk of a house down the block. She told me an involved story about the fire and how her people wanted to help the owner rebuild but instead he was sitting on his hands. "He lazy but he good man," she said. "I tell him you pick there." This seemed like a legitimate enough invitation to me.

Indeed it was a dandy heaven. When not molested by the mower, dandelions grow tall and robust, angling their Cheshire Cat grins toward the solar life-force. I picked the front and then slipped around back, which is where Dandelion Nirvana truly opened up before me. There was an abandoned car and a loud autobody shop on the other side of the fence. A black cat prowled a hedgerow. This yard hadn't been attended to in years! It was a sea of warm, inviting yellow.

I must have lost myself in the picking, because when I looked up I saw an old man sitting on the back stoop pulling a Budweiser out of a paper bag. It was 11 in the morning, and I decided this was a fairly valid maneuver on such an unseasonably hot April day. I picked my way over to him. He offered me the other can of beer in the bag, which I accepted.

"You police?"

No, I assured him, I was not. He was Laotian, too. His name was In Keow and he was 69 years old. Though the language barrier between us was tough, we persevered. His grandfather had once owned this home, he said. Next door lived a Vietnamese man. He said he was retired, that he had worked very hard, and that he would still work—but only for cash, no check. He was adamant about this last point. We sipped our beers in the hot morning sun.

In Keow was amused by my stoop labor in the dandelion patch. He had social security arriving once a month and some other unspecified payouts. Making wine—and spending hours plucking little dandelion petals to do it—was definitely not on his agenda. "I go to store,"he said proudly. "I buy beer." As for me, I wasn't about to argue with that logic. Springtime in America has never quite been what they say it used to be.

To make a simple Dandelion Wine, I followed the instructions of Pattie Vargas and Rich Gulling in Making Wild Wines & Meads. Combine 6 cups dandelion petals, 1 lb raisins, 2 lbs sugar, 1 tbsp acid blend, and 1 gallon boiling water into sanitized bucket. A day later mix a starter culture of 1 1/2 cups orange juice, 1 tsp yeast nutrient, and 1 package wine yeast in a jar, shake it up, and let it sit until bubbly, one to three hours. Pour starter culture into the vat along with 1 tsp pectic enzyme and loosely cover. Rack after three days into air-locked container, then rack again three months later and bottle. Wait another six months—until the depths of gloomy winter—to enjoy a taste of bottled sunshine.

Salad Days

The salad days are here again. Now is the time to take advantage of all the fresh new growth bursting with the sun's energy. If you're in California, the salad days have been on for a while; in the Great Lakes region you're just off the block. Wherever you are, enjoy those early greens. They were important—sometimes life-saving—for our ancestors and should be just as revered by modern Homo sapiens.

Want to commit a radical act? Step outside your back door and pick some weeds for the table. That's a metaphorical rock through the window of Big Ag and a first step toward putting our hopelessly effed-up food system on notice. As I've mentioned in numerous posts, many of the weeds we spend countless hours and dollars trying to eradicate are actually more nutritious than the stuff we grow on purpose. Think wild, think local, think seasonal. Think for yourself. You don't need some massive head of corporate-sanctioned lettuce from the supermarket to get your greens on.

Today's salad includes a mesclun-like mix of tender young greens: Dandelion, cat's-ear, chickweed, and bittercress. The rest is miner's lettuce, a native plant in my region. All are tasty and nutritious.

Foraging a Bite of History

Hey everyone. If recent posts have lacked a certain...um...immediacy, well that's because I've been on the road since the kids got out of school, traveling around the West. Pitstops have included the charming hamlet of Shasta, CA, and nearby Lassen Volcanic National Park; Nevada's Great Basin National Park; Utah's Dinosaur National Monument; and most recently, Telluride, Colorado, where we're visiting friends and just returned from a 3-day wilderness float through the Black Canyon of the Gunnison River (sans children!).

Fortunately, Blogger's nifty scheduling tool (available through Draft Blogger) enabled me to post a bunch of stuff before hitting the road. Foraging hasn't been a top priority on this trip; it ranks somewhere behind "not getting a speeding ticket while driving at top speed across the desert." Really, this has been more of a family vacation—as well as a chance for me to (try to) relax on the eve of my book's publication (August 30).

Vacation travel, generally speaking, is a time to throw food habits to the wind. We allow ourselves to put diets on pause, eat stuff we usually avoid, and dine at establishments of dubious repute. I wasn't expecting to forage any wild foods on this trip. Time is short, we have miles to make, and the emphasis is on seeing the sights. At Dinosaur National Monument in Utah we journeyed back millions of years in time along the Fossil Discovery Trail and soaked up the high desert ecosystem on the Sound of Silence Trail. Petroglyphs and pictographs told the story of earlier foragers, the Fremont people, who hunted and gathered in this harsh yet giving landscape.

But at the end of the road, where pioneer woman Josie Bassett Morris homesteaded along Cub Creek, a tributary of the Green River, I was surprised to find an abundance of edible weeds, and incorporated one into my lunch.

Josie Morris was indeed a "tough old girl," as I overheard another tourist say. Born in the 1870s, she grew up in Browns Park on the Colorado side of the Green River country where Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado meet, a place known both for its independent homesteaders and also as a refuge for outlaws. In 1914 she selected her own homestead site along Cub Creek on the Utah side in what is now Dino Monument and built her home. There she raised cattle, pigs, and chickens, grew vegetables, and lived off the land at a time when the rest of the country was discovering the conveniences of industrialized society.

Josie's life is now part of the Old West mythology. She married five times, was widowed by one husband and divorced four. One of her husbands died of suspicious circumstances, and during her lifetime Josie was variously accused of bootlegging, cattle rustling, harboring outlaws, and a number of other colorful crimes. She was known to be a friend of Butch Cassidy—some say more than just a friend—and it's said she helped him outrun law enforcement with fresh horses supplied from her own ranch.

It probably shouldn't have been a surprise to find a number of edible weeds growing on her former property, including lush patches of watercress crowding the irrigation ditches, lambsquarters, wild mint, and other sources of free nutrition that can be harvested with little effort.

The cabin site was like an oasis. Songs of orioles, yellow warblers, and lazuli buntings filled the air. We picnicked in the shade, and as I lunched on a ham-and-cheese sandwich buttressed with a handful of watercress pinched from a nearby patch, the thought occurred to me that I was enjoying a fortifying mouthful of greens from the same patch that Butch Cassidy might have delighted in decades earlier during one of his interludes of seeking safety and nourishment while on the run. And looking back further, my lunch was one in a string of meals stretching back thousands of years in this very place.

Modern day foraging, like any other knowledge handed down through millennia, is a chance to chime in on a conversation that people have been having since we came down out of the trees. If nothing else, I find pleasure in keeping alive this particular dialogue.

Happy Independence Day!

Pineapple Weed Express

In another lifetime I might have been a treasure seeker. That's what I dig about foraging. You study inscrutable charts (known as maps), pore over old parchments (on the Interwebs), and finally light out for adventure and riches in distant realms (down the block).

Like some of the great explorers of yesterday, I embarked this afternoon—this blistering, unseasonably hot afternoon—to open up a new tea route to the south. Iced tea, that is. I went in search of the lowly pineapple weed (Matricaria discoidea), a plant I knew nothing about until stumbling across a few references to it recently. Unlike virtually every other weed I've been snacking on in recent months, the pineapple is native. You've probably never noticed it before. It grows low to the ground, usually just a few inches tall, sometimes more than a foot in good conditions, with feathery leaves reminiscent of a carrot top and little greenish-yellow flowerheads about the size of a "peppercorn or pencil erasure," as Seattle botanist Arthur Lee Jacobsen puts it.

Like the sunflower, it is a composite, a member of the Asteraceae family, and is related to chamomile. Pineapple weeds flourish in marginal habitats: compacted soil, sidewalks, gravel beds, old lots. Their tap roots cling to the most hardscrabble of surfaces, the harder the scrabble the better. Crush a flower head between your fingers and you'll know right away if your identification is spot-on. That's right, the smell of pineapple. A pleasing scent to be sure. In Seattle they're harvestable from June through September.

So I set out with Big Dreams. Down the street I went, scanning the nooks and crannies of traffic circle planters, cracks in the sidewalk, guerilla paths of dogs and children. I saw many edible weeds, including a tall patch of Japanese knotweed, but no pineapple weed. My journey took me to the local p-patch, where I snapped some photos and inventoried the crops. Then, just when I was ready to turn around and return to home port in disgrace, at the bottom of a hill in a gravelly lot being used as a de facto driveway by local residents, I spied them: the object of my quest, a scraggly patch of pineapple weeds.



It didn't take long to dry the flower heads in the hot June sun. I spread them on a black plate outside our front door. An hour later I scooped up two teaspoon's worth and steeped them in two cups of hot water for 10 minutes. Then I added a touch of honey and ice, sat back in the rocking chair on the front porch, and remembered my days as an intrepid explorer while afternoon commuters fought their way home in the baking sun.

Dandy Tempura

In case you haven't noticed, dandelions have bigger brains than people. Seriously. And they get smarter each time you whack them. Mow a lawn of dandelions repeatedly and what happens? The dandelions learn to flower ever closer to the ground until those yellow Cheshire cat faces are grinning at you from beneath the grass. They know exactly how far down the cutting blade can reach, and that's where they proliferate once again.

The other day, after harvesting a few batches of dandelion petals for Dandy Bread, I actually mowed my lawn, surprising myself even more than my neighbors. It's been a week and the yard is already replenished with dandelions. No biggie. I picked a bunch of blooms for tempura.

Got a problem with tempura? I didn't think so. Here at FOTL we may periodically throw a tizzy about health and nutrition and generally staving off rot, but you won't hear a lot of griping about FAT. It's the stuff for which our ancestors put their lives on the line. Need some fat to survive the winter? Roger that, let's tool up and take down one of them #$*%&@ woolly mammoths again. Tucking into a bag of pork rinds doesn't carry quite the same cachet.

Yeah but making you own tempura and making it well is almost as cool as hurling a prehistoric projectile at an oversized elephant having a bad hair day. And while I've tried a bunch of tempura recipes over the years with wildly varying results, this time I think I figured out the secret. Whatever you do, make it more watery than you deem appropriate. I used a recipe found here, then tweaked it.

3/4 cup flour
1/4 cup corn starch
1/2 cup ice-cold water, plus extra
1 tbsp rice wine
1 egg

In a bowl mix the flour and corn starch. In a second larger bowl, beat an egg until frothy, then add the ice water and beat some more. Stir in the rice wine. Now add the dry ingredients and mix quickly, not worrying about the lumps. Don't over-mix! If the batter oozes off a spoon, it's too thick. Add more ice water until the batter is watery. It'll seem way too watery if you're used to making, say, Beer-Batter Fish and Chips, but trust me.

Now proceed over to the stove with your bowl o' batter and a plate of dandy flowerheads. Your vegetable oil should be good and hot by now. Flick in a drop of water to see if it pops and sizzles. Using your hands, dip a dandy in the seemingly too thin gruel. The batter will run off the dandy in sheets but the flower will still be thinly coated and looking rather sad and soggy. Gently drop the dandy into the oil, petals facing down, and PRESTO! The flower opens up as if the sun has just come out. (This miracle of kitchen chemistry won't happen if the batter is too thick and heavy.) It's really quite amazing to see the dandy regain its form, albeit with a beautifully thin veneer of crispy tempura as its new skin.

Dandy Tempura has an unusual mouth feel. If the batter is right, the outer crust should be crispy, yet being a flower, the overall texture is squishy. I mix the dandies in with other more traditional fare: sweet potato, bell pepper, onion, and zucchini, to name a few.

Now go pick a mess of ridiculously nutritious dandelions and start frying. That'll teach those PhD weeds!

Chickweed, Round 2

My first round with wild chickweed was the eye-opening Chickweed Chimichurri over Tuna Poke. For that I used a handful common chickweed (Stellaria media) foraged from a neglected rock garden down the block. Round 2 was a different species, mouse-ear chickweed (Cerastium fontanum), which I found growing adjacent to a neglected plot in a local p-patch.

The operative word here is neglected. Urban foragers should seek out these forgotten places: abandoned lots, pocket parks, de-facto green spaces. They're abundant with weeds, p-patches in particular, since the soil is usually of good quality. This p-patch in particular was bursting with red deadnettle (pictured above), dandelions, cat's ears, mint, and chickweed.

Mouse-ear chickweed, unlike common chickweed, is covered in tiny hairs. It's recommended to cook it first before eating, so I boiled mine for a few minutes, drained it, and then added it to the food processor with raw garlic, red pepper, a few heaping tablespoons of yogurt, olive oil, lemon juice, and a little bit of hot pepper, then whirred it into a creamy sauce—basically a chimichurri blended with yogurt.

Next I slathered a fillet of Alaskan rockfish with it and fired up the grill. The color isn't as striking as the chimichurri—alas, it's more of a puke green—but the taste was distinctive, green, garlicky, somewhat reminiscent of stinging nettle pesto but lighter because of the lemon and yogurt. I'll definitely be making this sauce again, perhaps with a little less garlic.

Lunch the following day? Leftover Rockfish Sammy with Chickweed Sauce.

Chickweed Chimichurri...or Bust!

Chickweed Chimichurri. Sounds like an Arizona ghost town. In fact, it's a zesty sauce, and last week it seemed like everywhere I turned I was hearing oohs and aahs about this magnificent harbinger of summer. Chalk that up to the viral times we live in. My tweet pal Patricia Eddy of Cook Local blogged about Chickweed Chimichurri and then set the recipe loose on Twitter. Next thing you know half of Seattle is discovering the little-known delights of wild chickweed, yet another nutritious weed thriving on the margins of polite society. A farm called Nash's Organic Produce in Dungeness, WA, even sells it.

Well I had to have some. I'd seen chickweed plenty of times in more rural locales. It's a member of the pink family, and though the tiny white flowers are hardly noticeable, they have elegantly cleft petals that are characteristic of the group. Several weeds in different genera go by the name chickweed (there's common chickweed, mouse-ear chickweed, star chickweed, and so on), and they all share similar traits: opposite leaves, tiny flowers, et-cetera. What I hadn't realized was they're edible, even choice, if you use them right. And a chimichurri sause is using them right.

According to Wikipedia (so it must be true), chimichurri hails from Argentina, where it was invented by an Irishman named Jimmy McCurry who was fighting for Argentinean independence in the 19th century; the sauce's name is reputedly a bastardization of his name. Go figure. Anyway, the traditional way to prepare it is with parsley, vinegar, garlic, oil, and hot pepper.

This past week I kept an eye out for chickweed all over the neighborhood—walking to the coffee shop or the bus stop, taking the kids to the park, wherever. If it was invading local farmers' fields (and being harvested and sold by the more industrious), then it probably had a foothold in the city, I reasoned, and sure enough, right across the street from my friend Kristin's house I found a lush patch of it growing from an untended rock garden next to the sidewalk. This was common chickweed (Stellaria media). I picked several handfuls and was off to the chimichurri races.

My recipe is based on Patricia's, which is based on Nash's, which is based on...oh never mind. You get the idea. Chickweed replaces the parsley and lemon juice replaces the vinegar. My tweak was to add sweet red pepper and shallot.

Tuna Poke with Chickweed Chimichurri

Chimichurri

1 packed cup chickweed, chopped
4-5 cloves garlic, minced
2 tbsp shallot, fine dice
3 tbsp sweet red pepper, fine dice
1 tbsp hot pepper, de-seeded, fine dice
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 tsp salt

Tuna Poke and Sushi Rice

1 lb sushi-grade tuna, cut into small (1/2 inch) cubes
2 cups sushi rice
rice vinegar to taste

Makes 4 servings.

Mix chimichurri ingredients together in a bowl and refrigerate for an hour or so. Meanwhile make seasoned (i.e. add rice vinegar) sushi rice and cut up a bunch of sushi-grade tuna. Serve a dollop of the raw tuna over a bowl of rice; garnish with the chimichurri. The acidity of the chimichurri immediately begins to act on the tuna, changing the flavor in subtle ways as you eat.

Now, about the taste. A dish like this would seem to cry out for cilantro, but please resist. We all know what that tastes like. The greens in this case are far removed from parsley, cilantro, and other standard ceviche offerings. In a word, they're wild. The bright green flavor, somewhat tempered by the other ingredients, gives this Tuna Poke a new twist. Enjoy it on its own merits or as a change of pace, preferably outside on a sunny day with a bottle of rosé wine.