Hi, folks! Many of you took home some dandelion greens with you on Tuesday evening, and if you’re like me, you may not have a great deal of experience preparing them. These are fairly bitter greens. The dandelion greens that we’re growing this year are not the same as wild dandelions (you can eat those, too), but rather, these are an Italian culinary variety in the chicory family. These dandelion greens are cousins to several other bitter critters such as escarole, endive, and radicchio.
Many good recipes for dandelion greens center around a tahini-based sauce or dressing, and this recipe is one example of that phenomenon. The recipe that follows is something I cooked up on Monday evening.
I’ve got the ingredients separated into three sets, based on what gets used together … have fun!
INGREDIENTS
one pint of chanterelles, roughly chopped
2 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
1 to 2 Tablespoons of butter
1/2 lb dandelion greens (or about 3 handfuls) washed and chopped into 1-inch pieces
3 Tablespoons water
3 Tablespoons sake
3 Tablespoons of tahini
3 (more) Tablespoons water
2 teaspoons soy sauce
PREPARATION
1) Slice your garlic and cut your chanterelles into bite-sized chunks. Don’t cut them up too small or they’ll begin to lose flavor. [A Chanterelle Shout-Out: I got the chanterelles from the Schneiderwind farmstand. They were locally wild-foraged … and they were amazingly good!]
2) Heat the butter in a sauté pan. Sauté the garlic and chanterelles together on low heat until the garlic begins to brown. Then set these guys aside for later.
3) Mix up the dressing. That’s the tahini, 3 tablespoons worth of the water, and the soy sauce.
4) Now you’re ready to cook the dandelion greens. I put 3 tablespoons of water and 3 tablespoons of sake in my original sauté pan and cooked the chopped greens in that. This worked fine. However, the next time I do this, I think I’m going to omit the water in this step. I’m just not sure it’s necessary. In any case, cook your greens in a small amount of liquid for about 30 seconds or a minute. It doesn’t take long for them to cook down.
5) Add the sautéed chanterelles and the garlic and the sauce. Let everything heat through … and you’re done!
As you can see from the photo, the sauce could have covered somewhat more dandelion greens. I think I could’ve used up to a pound of greens. As any other cooking green, they really do shrink.
Round two: I followed this recipe again with the following changes:
No water. I cooked the greens in 3 Tablespoons of sake, and in the sauce, I substituted 3 T of mirin (sweet cooking sake) for the 3 T of water. This substitution worked out pretty well, and I think I’ll do it again this way.
[Also, I didn’t have any chanterelles, so I used chopped fresh tomato and some pecans to top the greens in the end.]