Happy May, food & foraging friends!
What ancient wild vegetable is loved by lambs, hated by gardeners, healthier than spinach, kinship to quinoa and taller (at full height) than the average NBA player? Lambsquarters! Chenopodium album is popping up everywhere right now, not surprisingly, considering a single plant can produce 75,000 seeds and lay dormant in the soil for many years.
Otherwise known as wild spinach, pigweed, goosefoot and fat hen, lambsquarters got its common names for being a good forage plant to fatten up livestock. Its nutritional qualities are off the charts, typically boasting more protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, and vitamin C than spinach and many other leafy greens. It does contain a lot of oxalates, which can be an issue for people prone to kidney stones or other kidney issues, but the average person can eat this regularly (cooked) without concern.
Lord knows I have — this past month alone I’ve fermented lambsquarter with soy and sesame, stuffed it in a goat cheese quiche, sauteed it into a creamy orzo risotto, and my personal favorite, cooked with garlic and ginger and blended into an Indian saag with a dollop of plain yogurt. It’s gone into soups and stews and curries and dips. Its stems have been roasted to a crispy snack like kale chips. Its delicate arrow shaped leaves were even used to garnish my friend Aaron’s award-winning trumpet mushroom squash crostini, as pictured below!
Left/top: Gardeners beware: lambsquarters will quickly take over an area if left to seed. Magenta spreen, with a fuschia center, is a close cousin. Harvested young, lamsquarters stems can be eaten with the leaves without further processing or longer cooking times. The young leaves make for beautiful garnishes too.
Right/bottom: Lambsquarters is a workhorse in the kitchen, mild and versatile. It’s well loved in traditional Indian cooking and stands in well for most any recipe calling for cooked greens.
According to English writer Audrey Wynne Hatfield in How to Enjoy Your Weeds, lambsquarters was “once the most valued vegetable for human beings and fodder for their animals… It lost favour only after its relative, the novel spinach, was introduced from Southwest Asia in the sixteenth century,” and lambsquarters even grew so profusely in some areas that settlements were named for it. Hatfield goes onto say that it was a staple of the Neolithic, Bronze Age and early Iron Age people — the original Paleo diet!
When it comes to ID, I think its arrow-shaped leaves are quite distinctive, but its true tell is the white filmy coating on its tender young center shoots, which protect the leaves from water loss, heat, and ultraviolet light (that sounds like a pretty evolved plant, if you ask me).
A few ways I haven’t yet tried lambsquarters but plan to: Ghanaian palaver sauce and a nutrient-rich spread with nuts, chickpeas and avocado. Do you have a go to dish for this hearty, heat-loving green? Let me know… Maybe we need to have a lambsquarter cookoff before summer’s out!
Wildly yours,
April