by Jeanne Kay Guelke

If you’re a gardener, you are probably familiar with lamb’s quarters (aka Chenopodium album L., goosefoot, wild spinach) as a common companion to the hardy spring vegetables you planted yourself. This green herb has small spearhead-shaped leaves, scalloped along the margins, and a powdery white coating under the leaf surface. The BC Ministry of Agriculture has some nice pictures of lamb’s quarters yet also lists it as a noxious weed!

To foragers, home gardeners, and local foodies, however, this is an unjust maligning of a very nutritious salad green and pot herb. Lamb’s quarters come to us loaded with vitamins A and C, and are a good source of calcium and manganese. For a green plant, it has a decent amount of protein .

I’ve eaten lamb’s quarters in different places. Some of them seemed a little rank-tasting when raw, but the crop just harvested from my garden is sweet-tasting enough to go into the salad bowl. My favourite treatment is simply to steam them lightly, like chard or spinach, which removes any rank taste, and heightens the resemblance to spinach. Lamb’s quarters substitute nicely for cooked spinach or chard in any recipe I’ve tried for it.

Lamb’s quarters are best harvested when the plants are young, about as tall as your forefinger. The older ones are edible, but the coarse stalks are best stripped out of the tender leaves. Mature plants lose most of their leaves, in concentrating their energy in the seed-heads. I leave a few to seed and self-sow around the garden, thus ensuring next year’s crop—without having to plant them.

I often find them growing with another edible weed, the redroot pigweed, a member of the Amaranth family. Its leaves look a bit like mint, but have a slightly rank, rather than minty, taste.

If we have a bumper crop, I freeze lamb’s quarters. The process is to wash them, pick through to remove any coarse stems or foreign matter, and then chop coarsely. They will also do well as mixed greens, so it’s fine to chop them up with some young kohlrabi tops, beet leaves, turnip greens, etc. The greens go into a large heavy-bottomed pot with just enough water on the bottom to prevent sticking. (This process is known as “blanching” for some reason. Its purpose is to prevent deterioration of the vegetables during their sojourn in the freezer.) Turn up the heat, and once the bottom layer starts to cook, turn them over a few times so that the mass steams evenly. They are ready just as soon as all of the leaves have turned a bright emerald green: no longer.

Turn the lamb’s quarters into a colander in the sink. Run cold water over them to prevent further cooking, and to cool them down for freezing. Pick up handfuls of the cooled greens over the colander and squeeze the moisture out of them.

Place the greens in freezer bags, which you have labeled and dated. The amount per bag would depend upon a serving size for your household: the greens will expand slightly when reheated. Press the air out of the bags and seal. Into the freezer they go, to be enjoyed during the coming winter.

In searching the Internet for lamb’s quarters, I learned that some hay fever sufferers are allergic to the pollen, and large quantities of lamb’s quarters cause photosensitivity in some people. Putting the lamb’s quarters to good use before they pollinate and enjoying them in moderation would seem like more sensible responses than agribusiness’s answers to delicious edible weeds, which is to spray them with dubious chemicals while encouraging us to eat highly processed and packaged GMOs!