Due to coronavirus concerns, a lot of families will
be visiting grocery stores rarely if at all, feasting on caches that they had
collected prior to the state’s shutdown of schools, non-essential businesses,
and gatherings of any size.
While that may work for foods that can keep in
cupboard or freezer, it doesn’t for items that perish quickly. Among those are
leafy greens. Sooner or later, shut-in families might develop a serious hankering
for a salad.
Abstaining from going out in public shouldn’t deny
you of a salad. There are plenty of opportunities in your backyard and local
forests and fields to harvest fresh leaves. The veritable lockdown of the
Empire State coincides with the finest wild salad harvest of the year as many
of the young plants greening now have vibrant flavors.
I encourage you to grab a good field guide or use
an app to help you identify some of these plants that will allow you to amass
some very tasty and very healthy salads.
Dandelion:
Many homeowners tend to look at this wonderful yellow flower as a blight upon
their lawns and do everything they can to eradicate it. They don’t know what
they are missing. The leaves, with their teeth-like indentations that lend
themselves to the lion name, are delicious this time of year and can be eaten
raw. Closer to summer, they take on a little bitterness that deserves a good
boiling. The greens are chock full of nutrition -- Popeye would hate to hear that
they are healthier than spinach and are especially heavy in Vitamin A. The
roots can also be collected, diced and boiled, adding something akin to a water
chestnut to your salad.
Chickweed:
If you look around fields and “waste areas” (naturalist-speak for disturbed
sites left to grow back to weeds and greenspace) you will find plenty of
chickweed in bloom right now. It grows low to the ground in vast colonies, its
heart-shaped leaves augmented by tiny white flowers. Compared to most wild
greens, it is quite tender and can be eaten raw or cooked only slightly. You
can eat the leaves, stems and flowers, so you need not worry about having to
over-manicure the small plants. It’s a healthy plant, too, as it was used by
settlers to keep scurvy at bay.
Plantain:
Not to be confused with cooking bananas that are also known as plantain, common
plantain, like the dandelion, is another plant that’s a bane to those who fuss
too much over lawn perfection. You will recognize its sturdy, oval-shaped
leaves that, come summer, are joined by their flowers that grow on skinny
spikes or stalks. By summer their leaves have too woodsy of a flavor but for
the next month and a half they are tasty raw or boiled. They are quite fibrous,
and have laxative qualities, so they are best had as augmenters to your salad,
not as the base green. These so-called weeds are also high in Vitamins A and C.
Dock: This
is another plant that green thumbs despise, as it can quickly take over a
garden. Its long leaves are powerful things, having more Vitamin C than oranges
and more Vitamin A than carrots. They have a lemony flavor to them, so they can
help season a salad. If that flavor proves too bitter, they can be boiled or
panfried – unlike most greens they don’t lose their bulk when cooked.
There are many more wild plants that can be eaten.
Being able to identify them and understand their uses – and risks – could make
for great science study for homebound schoolkids and collecting them could
present an interesting pastime for lockdowned families – especially those
wanting a salad or looking for creative ways to have the kids weed the garden
or lawn.
Just because you can’t get to school or the store
doesn’t mean coronavirus should stop us from enriching our minds and bodies.
Savor nature’s bounty – enjoy a salad!
From the 30
March 2020 Greater Niagara Newspapers and Batavia Daily News
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