When your garden gives you weeds

"When your garden gives you weeds.......eat them"

So weeding the garden has been added to the routine of daily life, they grow as constant and high as the laundry and dishes around here.  And after a week of resting my ankle on the couch it all seemed to run away from me.  The good thing is we can actually eat some of the weeds.  Pictured below is our strawberry patch infested with lambs quarter, my friend Beth cooked some up for us while they were still tiny on Memorial Day, by now they are so tall and numerous we are able to feast on them.  So we picked a very large pile.

Also from the garden we picked a pile of garlic scape.  They are the curly green things that grow out of garlic, and to be honest when I first saw them I thought there was something wrong with the garlic.  I quickly learned that theses are actually the flower of the garlic and it is recommended to pick them off to encourage larger bulbs.  We picked a large pile and cooked them with whatever we've been making, using them kind of like chives or onions.  There was so much leftover though we also made a few batches of garlic scape pesto to freeze. 

To prepare the lambs quarter I snapped off the roots and on the larger ones picked the leaves off the stem.  These were rinsed and soaked until the water was clear.

Then I simply tossed them in a skillet with butter and the garlic scapes.  They cook up just like spinach, wilting and shrinking in size but are packed with a lot more nutrients.

I paired it with a few fresh eggs and was wishing the goat cheese I experimented with wasn't such a flop - it would have been the perfect finish to this farm fresh lunch.  The lambs quarter was even better than spinach!  And it was free and I had to clear it out anyway.  Now, if I could only convince the rest of my family.

For those who are local Linda Diane Feldt will be at the Ann Arbor Green Fair this Friday to promote wildcrafting, I have her book Beyond Spinach and recommend it for anyone interested in cooking their weeds.

Eating weeds was only scary the first time I did it,   Now, not only does it seem normal, it just makes sense and it always tastes so good!  Free food I didn't have to plant, water or even weed.