Happy July, food & foraging friends!
Holy mackerel, has it been hot. This Monday was the hottest day recorded on Earth — breaking the previous record high, which had been set just the day before.
I’ve been traveling again much of this month, and came home to a garden decimated by heat and drought. Yet I knew I could count on two wild, nutritious heat-loving plants to grace my plate: purslane and amaranth.
Purslane (Portulaca oleracea) is a slightly sour succulent beloved around the world, particularly in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisines. In Greece, it is used in feta and tomato salads and cooked in a tomato-based stew. In Mexico, purslane is known as verdolagas and is used in soups, stews, salsas, and even chiles rellenos. And in India, purslane is added to a host of dishes, from dal to a savory pancake known as bhajani thalipeeth. Purslane is even cited in the Bible (albeit with a not-so-nice reference to its sometimes slimy mouthfeel)! And yet I’ve never seen purslane on an American menu, though it grows prolifically in summer in most parts of the country.
Visiting friends in Brooklyn last weekend, we stumbled onto a rooftop garden blanketed with purslane. Filling my purse with the bounty, I put it to work in their kitchen, starting with a purslane potato salad with edible flowers, which I made again today for a picnic, this time adding watermelon and a basil vinaigrette as a “summer’s greatest hits” dish. I also made one of my go-to spreads, an herby purslane yogurt dip that can also be thinned into a cold summer soup. My friends loved this smeared on sourdough toast and topped with poached egg. I personally enjoy purslane more raw than cooked, as cooking brings out its mucilaginous character (see: the Bible), but a jalapeno tomato purslane sauté made a great side dish too.
Purslane is a downright virtuous food, extremely high in Omega-3 fatty acids, vitamins A, C, and E, as well as minerals like magnesium, calcium, and potassium. You can sometimes find it in Whole Foods or farmer’s markets, but you can always find it growing wild and free in gardens and on random street corners!
Left/top: Nutritious, juicy, heat-loving purslane works great in salads, stews, dips, sauces and more. Bottom right photo shows what a super spreader it can be in disturbed urban soils; like amaranth, a single plant can produce 240,000+ seeds that can endure in the soil up to 40 years.
Right/bottom: A few types of wild amaranth at different life stages; this resilient plant will grow in the most improbable locations in hot, dry weather. Bottom right, blanched amaranth greens, lambsquarters saag and fried milkweed pods, all foraged this month.
And then there’s amaranth — not a single species but a whole genus of 60+ ornamental and edible plants, with red, green and gold tassels that bear hundreds of thousands of protein-rich seeds used as pseudo-grains.
Like purslane, amaranth’s history spans thousands of years, as an important food source for ancient civilizations in Central and South America. It was a staple and ritual food for the Aztecs, cultivated alongside maize and beans. But as a subscriber once educated me, the Spanish conquistadors banned the cultivation of amaranth due to its association with Aztec religious practices. In the process, this nutritional powerhouse was relegated to a lowly weed status, with derogatory nicknames like pigweed.
It took me a while to warm up to amaranth, as there are typically so many other beloved greens like lambsquarters growing at the same time of year. Nowadays, I am quick to put amaranth in my starting lineup in the kitchen, whether as an assist to a soup or as a main attraction. Back in Brooklyn, my friends hosted a backyard dinner party, and I cooked a mess of red and green amaranth with onions, butter and chicken stock for a side dish. A guest from Tanzania declared my greens “a taste of home,” and I can’t think of a higher compliment.
Hope you’re surfing the heat waves like an Olympiad in Tahiti… enjoy those midsummer eats!
Wildly yours,
April
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