I’ve heard for a while that Claytonia perfoliata is edible, but only got my hands on enough for a salad this last weekend. A local gardener was planning on clearing some from a bed and offered to let me share in the bounty. Thank you, Diana!
Here are a few individual stems + leaves + flowers:
In preparing it for eating, I removed most of the flowers, leaving a few for decoration. I thought they might be a little more bitter than the rest of the plant. I wish I had removed more of the stems since some were a bit tough (but not too bad either though — nothing like burr medic, where no amount of chewing was enough). When rinsing the leaves, I noticed that the top surface was kind of slippery.
First we tried some leaves on top of buttered toast. I thought it was pleasant. The leaves were crisp and juicy, a little bitter — refreshing.
Next we had some salad — vinegar, olive oil, black pepper, garlic powder, Parmesan. As expected, it was a good substitute for lettuce. Pretty nice.
I also got some Claytonia perfoliata plants with roots and planted a few clumps of these:
I know the plants will die down soon so my main purpose in doing this is to try to get viable seeds into the ground. (I also tossed the flowers I removed from the plants destined for eating into the yard in the hope that they’ll mature.) If it turns out to be too prolific, I may “rooreh” the day I did this. But if we do end up with too much of it, at least we’ll have some good eating.
(I release theses photos into the public domain. These works are marked with CC0 1.0, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.)
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