Lamb's Quarter: The Best Cooking Green I Don't Even Plant
Lamb's quarter is a wild edible green that grows as a weed through most of Canada, and it is one of the best cooking greens you will ever put in a pan. You use it anywhere you would use spinach or chard. Give the young leaves and tender growing tips a quick blanch, or saute them with butter and garlic, or fold them into eggs, soup, or a savoury pie. If you already grow a vegetable garden, you probably already have it, and you have probably been pulling it out and tossing it on the compost.
That's the part that blows my mind and why I'm writing this post to encourage you to utilize this amazing plant. The weed you have been fighting all summer is food, and it is MUCH better food than the spinach you drove to the store to buy. I stopped growing spinach years ago because lamb's quarter comes up in my beds on its own, for free, and I think it tastes 100X better. Cleaner, a little creamier, without that mineral, metallic thing spinach leaves on your teeth.
How to know you have lamb's quarter
Lamb's quarter (its Latin name is Chenopodium album, and it is a cousin of spinach, beets, and quinoa) is one of the easier wild plants to learn, which is a big part of why I point new foragers to it first.
Look for these things together:
- Leaves shaped a bit like a goose's foot, or a soft diamond, often with a few blunt teeth along the edge.
- A dusty, white, powdery coating on the underside of the leaves and the growing tip. Rub a top leaf and it can feel almost powdery. That coating is the giveaway.
- An upright plant that can be a few inches tall in a garden bed or shoot up past your knee by late summer.
- It loves disturbed ground and often really bad soils. Garden beds, the edge of a driveway, a pile of soil someone dumped last year. Wherever you have turned the earth, it turns up.
Two honest cautions. First, only pick from ground you know has not been sprayed, and rinse it well, the same as you would any green. Second, like spinach and chard, lamb's quarter contains oxalates, so cook it rather than eating bowls of it raw, and go easy if oxalates are something you watch. A blanch handles this and it is how I use it anyway.
Why I quit buying spinach
I got talking about this with Kevin Kossowan on the podcast, and we landed in the same place without planning to. He called it the best cooking green he has ever come across and said he would choose it first every time. I feel exactly the same. It has replaced farmed spinach in my kitchen completely. I do not even plant spinach anymore, because the lamb's quarter is going to show up whether I invite it or not, and it costs me nothing. I feel like this savings in my time here allows me to justify a longer time enjoying my coffee, doing nothing in the mornings.
There is something I love about that. Foraging today is a luxury. Most of us are not out there because we will starve otherwise, we are out there because it is a joy and it connects us to the season. Lamb's quarter is the rare wild plant that crosses over into being genuinely practical. It is not a novelty I pick once to say I did. It is a staple I actually cook with all year.
How I cook it
TLDR: treat it like sauteed spinach.
Wash the leaves and tips, shake most of the water off, and drop them into a hot pan with butter or a good splash of olive oil. Add a clove of smashed garlic. It wilts down fast, in a couple of minutes, and it shrinks the way spinach does, so pick more than you think you need. Salt at the end. Squeeze of fresh lemon juice (I add A LOT, think sitting in a seaside taverna in Greece).
For a bigger cook, blanch it first. Bring a pot of well-salted water to a boil, drop the leaves in for thirty seconds to a minute, then lift them straight into a bowl of cold water to stop the cooking and hold the colour. Squeeze the water out in your hands into a tight little ball. Now it is ready to chop into a savoury pie, mix into a filling, stir through pasta, or freeze.
It plays beautifully with eggs. A frittata with lamb's quarter, a bit of onion, and whatever cheese you have is a real weeknight dinner in my house, especially in the back-to-school stretch when nobody has time to fuss.
Putting it up for the year
Here is the move that turned lamb's quarter from a nice summer green into something I rely on. I pick a ton of it while it is coming up thick, blanch it, squeeze it into balls, and freeze it. That is it. It keeps me going the full, full year.
I get enough just from the weeds in my own garden to fill the freezer, which still makes me laugh. I am harvesting a crop I never planted and freezing it for winter like it is precious, which it is. When there is snow on the ground and I want something green in a soup, I pull a frozen puck out and I am glad I did the work in July.
If you want the step by step on blanching and freezing greens so they do not turn to mush, I go deeper on that in a companion piece, but the short version is above. Boil hard, cook briefly, shock cold, squeeze dry, freeze in portions.
Where to pick, and picking with some sense
Lamb's quarter is generous, so there is no reason to be greedy or careless about it.
Pick the top few inches and the young leaves. Those are the tender, mild ones. As the plant gets tall and starts to flower and set seed later in the season, the lower leaves toughen and the stems get stringy, so work your way up and take the fresh growth. Because it grows so readily, taking the tips actually encourages it to bush out and give you more.
Skip anything growing right against a busy road, in a spot that might get sprayed, or where dogs clearly hold court. A garden bed, a friend's untreated yard, the edge of a field you have permission to be on, all perfect.
The bigger point
I love plants like this because they change how you see the ground you walk over every day. Once you can spot lamb's quarter, you cannot un-see it. You will clock it in the crack of a sidewalk, in the community garden, in the sad strip of dirt beside the grocery store parking lot where you used to buy the spinach. That is the shift I want for you. Not a survival skill, a small daily reconnection to real food that was there the whole time.
So this summer, before you yank that weed and toss it, look again. Rub the top leaf and check for that dusty white coating. If it is there, you are not weeding. You are harvesting dinner.
