The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [53]
“You probably can cook them a lot of ways. Like, you could just cook them with some garlic, like broccoli rabe or something,” he said. He shrugged. “But with ones like this, the common plantain, or other big leaves, I usually just cook them into tomato sauce, eat them just like that. I’m sure you can do a lot more with them, but that’s just how I usually do it. Maybe you could make a stuffing with some of them. I’m not sure.”
Clearly, Tim wasn’t claiming to be a culinary expert. I thanked him, and as I gathered more of the three plants we’d tried so far, I began imagining what other uses I could put them to.
“Someone just asked a good question,” Tim said, addressing the group. “How do you cook these? Well, you can just eat them without cooking, like the really young, tender greens, which we’ll hopefully find lots of today, or you can boil them or saute them on their own, or with garlic. If anyone else has any other suggestions on how to cook them or serve them, please feel free to share.”
The rest of the group looked around at one another and gave a few shrugs before going back to collecting greens. We were a bit of a quiet group that day, considering the fact that most looked like young and opinionated activists. When he began the tour and introduced himself, Tim had taken a hand count of how many people had done wild foraging before, and only three or four hands were raised. Perhaps everyone else was as content as I was to just soak in all the new knowledge.
“Also, on how to store them,” Tim continued. “These greens usually keep for a couple of weeks or more in your crisper. I still have a big bag of them at home. The reason for that is because what you’re taking home has just been picked today, instead of the chard, or whatever you get at the grocery store, that was picked who knows when and traveled however far before.”
I grabbed a bunch of poor man’s pepper leaves and added them to my plastic bag before the tour moved on. We followed the path farther into the park and eventually made a stop at a tall plant with long green leaves that seemed to resemble the plants people might hang from the ceiling in their homes. But it was not the leaves that Tim had stopped for. This was a very common plant called burdock, but the edible prize jewel was underneath the dirt, its root. The burdock root is also known as gobo in Japanese cuisine, where it’s a popular delicacy, and it has a mild, woody flavor and a texture like that of a potato. Once again, another haute-cuisine food find, free and plentiful.
Tim explained that the burdock is a biennial plant, so it takes two years to complete its full life cycle. At one year, the burdock’s root is the edible delicacy gobo. There is also second-year burdock, which is much tougher and not considered very good for eating. By then, the large leaves of the plant have sprouted two-foot-tall stalks, so it’s easy to tell which plant has a first-year or second-year root beneath it. He used a trowel to dig up one plant. The root emerged, along with a hunk of earth and miniature roots that came off in showers. Once Tim had shaken it relatively free of dirt, he held the small, carrot-shaped root for us to see. Compared to the rest of the plant, it was tiny. Although it wasn’t commonly eaten, the rest of the plant—its large leaves and crisp stems—was also edible, he explained.
In the produce aisles of grocery stores, I rarely found root vegetables that were still attached to their leaves. If you were looking for turnips, then turnip roots you would find in bins, trimmed at the stem. My first assumption was that the greens attached to these roots would not be that tasty, or even edible. But recently, I’d discovered this wasn’t always the case. It had begun with beets; their mild-tasting leaves are actually one of my favorite leafy greens to saute, much more delicate than the thick, dense leaves of kale, for instance. Biologically, beet greens are almost the same green as chard, and the beet’s deep red stems provide added nutrients that are also found in beets. I’d also tried out carrot