Wild Spinach Salad

A light dinner salad featuring wild spinach.

One of my favorite discoveries this season has been that of wild spinach. This "weed" proliferates in areas where the ground has been disturbed--think of the average garden bed. Indeed, I learned to identify wild spinach as a food just hours after destroying probably  two or three hundred volunteer wild spinach plants competing for nutrition with the few okra plants I had started from seed. (I still would have "weeded" to favor the okra, but I might have harvested the young plants instead of simply relegating them to the compost pile.)

Wild spinach is highly nutritious, more so than its cultivated cousin; however, unlike the curlier cultivated varieties, this plant's leaves like to lie flat, very flat, on the plate. This necessitates keeping clusters of leaves together on the plant's side-stems in order to give the food some "body" on the plate. The flavor is mild and the leaves are less crisp than the cultivated spinach leaves I've eaten.

The light dinner salad featured in the photo includes wild spinach from the yard, tomatoes, basil, curly parsley, and sweet banana peppers from the garden, and small pieces of lemon for zest. A few squeezes of fresh lemon and a drizzle of olive oil dressed the salad for serving.

When I discovered wild spinach in John Kallas's Edible Wild Plants: Wild Foods from Dirt to Plate, I enjoyed his story about visiting a U-pick farm operation, picking a container of the crop for sale and basket of wild spinach, only to have the proprietor not only give him the "weeds" for free but invite him back to gather more anytime he wished.

If more people would develop an appreciation for such wild plants as food, they might help local farmers as well as themselves by volunteering to weed the rows--and then taking home those very "weeds" for dinner.