Sometimes, all it takes is a little inspiration. After months of moping around eating takeout, I finally found mine roaming the Union Square Greenmarket last Saturday with my dear sister. We didn’t know what we would find, but we knew it would be good. We weren’t disappointed.
Besides the blueberries and strawberries (both awesome, by the way), the main event at the Greenmarket this past weekend was greens. We saw all manner of lettuces, wild and domestic arugula, Swiss chard, purlsane. It was a salad-maker’s dream out there!
Our dinner plans morphed for about twenty minutes as we wandered the market and weighed the possibilities. Should we make a bracing arugula salad? I dallied by the rainbow of Swiss chard for a while, too, but we stopped deliberating when we encountered some enormous bunches of pristine dandelion greens. I had never tried these before, but had always been curious. What fun!
Once we found our inspiration veggie, the rest of the meal fell into place. We’ve always been fans of beans and greens, so we decided to make pasta with dandelion greens and white beans. While we were wandering about, I bought a bunch of spring garlic on a whim.
Once home, we pulled out a bag of mayacoba beans from Rancho Gordo. Since we hadn’t presoaked them, we cooked them for about 40 minutes in the pressure cooker because we wanted the beans to be quite soft and creamy.
While the beans were cooking, we washed up the dandelion greens (no small feat — they were quite sandy from all of the recent rain!) and chopped them coarsely. We also minced about half a head of the spring garlic, discarding the tough outer layers and started the pasta water.
Once we took the beans off the heat, the meal came together easily. We sauteed the spring garlic briefly with a teaspoon of dried rosemary in a generous dollop of olive oil over medium heat, then added the dandelion greens. We discarded the bottom third of the leaves for fear they would be too tough. The greens wilted fairly quickly, but we weren’t shy about cooking them down aggressively, as the stems took quite some time to become tender. While the greens were wilting, we also started cooking a couple of handfuls of gemelli pasta.
When the pressure finished releasing naturally from pressure cooker, we spooned the beans and some of their liquid into the pan with the greens, so their flavors could begin to combine. When the pasta was nearly cooked, we flipped it into the pan to finish cooking with the greens and beans. On a whim, we chopped up a slice of prosciutto and stirred it in, because a little cured pork is always a good thing. We finished the dish off with the juice of half a lemon and some salt and pepper to taste.
Eating this pasta made me wonder why I had waited so long to get back into the kitchen. So good! The mayacoba beans were creamy, rich, and almost meaty. They were a fantastic pairing for the strong flavored dandelion greens. I was glad that we kept everything else simple. The simple flavor combination of rosemary, garlic and lemon, it just … worked. The flavors were assertive enough to accent the strong flavors of the beans and dandelion greens, but did not compete with them. I thought the prosciutto was a nice addition, but the dish was plenty rich even before we added it, so it was definitely optional.
Lessons? Dandelion greens are tasty, and everyone should try them. And I should cook more often!
Clacked by Molly B.
on Jun 23, 2009 @ 13:00 EST5EDT
Nice to have you back, Molly.