After a winter of monotone, spring's rapid green always takes me by surprise. I forget just how green; the speed of dandelions. I used to tag along with my grandmother, along rural Indiana roads, collecting enormous bouquets of dandelion greens. Did they grow more lush and tall then, or was it that I was smaller? We would come home with mountains of greens, to be trimmed and simmered with bits of bacon, canned and stored for the following winter.
My local Kroger store carries dandelion greens in season. But what's the fun of eating them, if you haven't properly foraged? There was some discussion on Facebook last week about eating pokeweed greens. Apparently, they are poisonous, so they have to be cooked and drained three times before sauteing. Somehow that takes away from the fun of the hunt. I'm sticking to dandelion greens...or spinach...for that matter. It tastes the same.
The dandelion was long popularly known as the pissabed
because of its supposed diuretic properties,
and other names in everyday use included mare's fart,
naked ladies, twitch-ballock, hounds-piss, open arse, and bum-towel.
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
*dandelion at Willow Manor
