Foraging for Dandelions
Some excursions take you deep into the forest and require a careful eye, while others can be found right in your backyard! Whether there are little ones in your group or if you are just looking for a challenge in the kitchen to impress dinner guests, dandelions are a fun way to ease into foraging!
There are only a few guidelines for this type of foraging, keeping things easy but IMPORTANT!! While dandelions are easy to find, they are also one of the plants most often sprayed with chemicals. Yikes! For this adventure, you may want to deviate a bit from the beautiful cut grass. Even if you don’t spray your lawn, a well intentioned neighbor might, and that stuff carries in the wind!
After taking a hike into a safe space, pesticide free, dandelion hunting should be quite easy! Often you will find these flowers in clusters, and unlike many foraging adventures, these bright yellow flowers sure help us in our seeking!
Typically the flowers grow faster than the leaves, so if you are in an area where the grass is mowed often, you may have a harder time finding leaves fit for cooking. Try to walk a bit further to where the grass has not been cared for and you will have better luck with long leaves.
Ideally, pick your leaves low to the ground to gain the most surface area of the leaf as possible. The flowers are actually edible as well (good recipes available for fritters and cupcakes with a simple internet search!), but for this adventure, I stuck with just leaves.
A word for beginners-often in a cluster of dandelions, a friendly companion is the thistle. While these leaves structurally look similar, a quick poke to the hand will assure you they are not! Be careful if you are pulling quickly to avoid these imposters 🙂
Meandering back to our home base, be sure to carefully wash our treasures, removing any unwelcomed friends or other greens. Most of the recipes involve chopping up these greens or in other ways cooking down, so don’t worry too much if these don’t look as pretty as you’d like!
In my first experiment, I finely chopped down the greens and made this into the chimichurri sauce shown here. With this consistency, these greens could easily be made into a fun pesto with other herbs, or reduce the amount of oil and use inside a stuffed chicken breast!
Blackened Pork Loin with Dandelion Green Chimichurri
To give full credit to this leaf without masking it’s flavor too much, I wanted to try them in a fairly natural state (recipe below). I think a bit of lemon was a great call here, as raw, dandelion greens have a little bite, similar to arugula. The acidity of the lemon balanced this very well!
Roasted Garlic and Lemon Mahi-Mahi over Wilted Dandelion Greens
Overall, I would say this entire journey was a blast! Enjoying a meal together can be such a special occasion, and this was a fabulous conversation piece! Instead of spending hours hunting through the deep forest, at times coming back empty handing, this was a rewarding and family friendly foraging trip! Bonus, it really got me thinking about the preparation of greens throughout the season. Spring often brings more bitter flavors, and most of these can be quite interchangeable if you have other greens you would prefer to use. I’d love to hear how you use your greens if you cook with dandelions!!
Thank you for following along on another addition of my crazy adventures. Some are big, some are small, but I sure do have fun getting outside and rolling up my sleeves in the kitchen! Hopefully this inspires thought with your own cooking, using some ingredients outside of the grocery cart. Check out some of the other foraging trips on the blog, or seasonal produce used throughout market tours.
If you are a social media user, I’d love to have you follow along on Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest as I post new ideas and recipes with my findings!
Thanks again for joining me! Peace and Love friends! (I couldn’t dig up a childhood photo of a flower tiara, so this will be my tribute to the memory).
Hannah (your fearless culinary visionnaire)
