Purslane Salad with Garlic-Yogurt Sauce

Every summer, one of my garden beds is taken over by this weed. I pull it up but it keeps coming back. It grows at an alarming rate.


It looks like this up close.


Here, it is fighting for acreage with our strawberry plants, which also grow at an alarming rate. The lavender just tries to mind its own business.


So imagine my shock when I saw a recipe using this, this, WEED on the Almost Turkish Recipes blog. This WEED has a name: purslane. Or pigweed. Or verdolaga, if you please. And, not only is it an edible cousin to spinach, it's very nutritious--high in Omega 3 fatty acids. It's the salmon of the vegetable world! Except that salmon is expensive and this stuff is free and in my backyard. The author of Almost Turkish recipes, as well as other food blogs I've read, seem to have a difficult time finding this and when they do, it's priced rather dearly. My fellow food bloggers, you are more than welcome to come and raid my backyard! Please, I beg you. I'm drowning in purslane.

Thanks to the dismally cold and wet Seattle summer, none of my vegetables save the snap peas flourished. I am determined to harvest something, dammit! Tonight, it was the WEED. I made a Purslane Salad with Garlic-Yogurt Sauce. Here's the bunches of WEED that I yanked out, washed off, and cut up.


I sauteed a minced onion with garlic, added lemon juice & water, somesalt, some rice, and let that simmer. At the last minute, I chopped up some tomatoes and tossed them in for color. I mixed minced garlic into some plain yogurt and black pepper as a sauce to dollop on the salad. We had the WEED rice salad with tofu dogs and homemade raspberry iced tea, because that's how we roll in this house--random combinations of food that we dare to call dinner!


The verdict? Barrett was a bit hesitant on it. He liked it alright, but acknowledged its "different" flavor and said he simply wasn't used to it. I can see where he's coming from. It's bright and almost lemony, very hearty, but with a decided earth-y overtone. You can taste that this grew in soil, more than most other greens I've eaten. I understand people not taking to it. I like it. I want to try other recipes with it, like the purslane salsa recipe I spotted somewhere.

And thus ends the story of the WEED.

Postscript: we recently acquired a very very very fuzzy couch pillow that Colin absolutely adores. He adores it so much, he drools on it while kneading it. His new nickname when he is kneading on this pillow? McLovin'.