A Recipe for Death Or for Delight?
Armed with a recipe from Forager Chef and a bag of fresh-picked goldenrod, I determined I would make part of my dinner with weeds.
Although rotten-lemony bitter, goldenrod greens are edible. Once I ate an entire leaf in only five minutes. You know when you really don’t want to swallow something and it becomes like old chewing gum, stuck under your lip? Yeah. That was it while I was swaggering around with a green mouthful of yuckiness, wondering if I should swallow or just die now.
The Goldenrod Rule goes, “Eat goldenrod and you’ll probably live to regret it.”
Goldenrod, a tall, yellow-flowering weed, grows all over the USA. I followed a recipe by the talented chef and writer, Alan Bergo, AKA the Forager Chef.
Living in a Texas field made finding and decapitating several goldenrod plants easy. After blanching the fresh-cut stalks to soften them, I added vinegar, honey, peanuts, butter, and pepper, sauteing them into Asianic, sweet-and-spicy perfection, loosely following the recipe with ingredients that we had on hand. *chef’s kiss*
In the end? I enjoyed it, but no one else could stomach the flavor.
This is a high-definition picture of the edge of the pot the shoots are being blanched in. No, don’t tell me, I already know I should consider becoming a photographer.
Me sauteing up the green goodness in butter. You know you want some.
My dad, in no uncertain terms, told me that he loved my cooking. “I wish I hadn’t eaten the bite I did.”
Dawn Wild, my sister, wasn’t equivocal. “It was really, really bitter and… bitter.”
I didn’t exactly have to pry it from their hands.
Thanks to my eating the leaves raw for months, I was mostly accustomed to the flavor. The trick is to enjoy the sweet-and-spicy and then swallow before the juice of the greens can drain out onto your tongue. While the flavor was bearable, my mind was sending mixed signals. I worried I had prepared the wrong plant and would immediately throw it back up and keel over to die.
Happily, I’m not dead (at the time of my writing this), so I suppose it was goldenrod—or, at least, nothing poisonous.
The goldenrod was gross, the recipe was great, and I learned that it’s the thought, not the taste, that counts.
All in all, it was weedlicious.
Indy.
P.S. I’ve attached a waiver of liability if you want to try goldenrod.
