Good Earth Health

Lamb’s  Quarter (Chenopodium album) is a very nutritious, free food that is abundantly available in many places.  In fact, there’s tons of it in my yard. 

When it’s small, you can remove the entire plant from unwanted places and eat the chopped leaves and stems as you would any cooked green.  Young leaves can be added to salads.  You can allow other plants to grow and continue to harvest the leaves through fall.  They can get quite large.  I had one that was over 5 feet tall and probably 4 feet wide last year. 

The flavor is very mild and goes well with a variety of foods.  One of my favorites is fried potatoes (really they’re more sauteed, but I’m from Missouri and we call them fried) with onions and lamb’s quarter.  Boil the potatoes a little, you don’t want them to be soft.  Heat an iron skillet (I always try to cook in iron) add butter or olive oil, add diced onion and sliced potatoes.  You’ll be cooking these until they start to get brown.  Add the lamb’s quarter toward the end (cooking time will depend on the age and tenderness of your greens). 

The seeds are also very nutritious.  They can be harvested later in the year.  I like to wait until they dry on the plant.  Use them anywhere you would use flax seed.

You may have noticed that I’ve slipped in a plant most people might not consider an “herb.”  It’s my goal to open up people’s definitions a bit…herb, weed, food…what’s the difference?  The foundation of my herbalism practice is nutrition, this includes the food that I eat and the herbs that I use as supplements.