A meal: a summer greens and herbs pizza or I think that weed will taste good on my food

Many of our leafy green vegetables are winding down as the summer goes along. A walk around the garden before dinner yielded a variety of tasty leftover leafy greens that once they were brought into the kitchen were perfect for a summer greens  and herbs pizza with summer squash and broccoli and green huatusco peppers. You can find a pizza dough in an earlier post. 

The pizza:

costata romanesca squash
broccoli
kale
radicchio

basil
garlic
green huatusco peppers

summer savory

puslane

magenta lambsquarters

oregano flowers

multiplier onions

pizza dough
olive oil
salt

Now you are probably wondering what the heck is purslane and magenta lambsquarters. Well, they seem to be all the rage with gardener's these days. Some gardeners may call them weeds. On the farm they pop up here and there or sometimes everywhere. While we never sowed the seeds or wanted to grow them ourselves, we seem to be stuck with them as "weeds that are edible". 

Purslane is a fleshy herbaceous plant in the Portulacacea family that likes warm weather. Like a Farmer's Almanac saying, Yeti has always said, "when the purslane is beginning to grow in the garden it is time to plant the peppers." And now it's all over the place. 

Purslane is a pretty common culinary delight in European and Asian cooking and has a sour salty taste. It is a nutritious leafy green that is high in vitamins A, C, and B and is apparently very high in Omega-3 fatty acids. It is also a medicinal in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Here's a fun little website with some purslane info. 

Magenta Lambsquarters is in the Chenopodiacea family much like Amaranth and Quinoa. This plant is also called spreen or tree spinach. It has a mild spinachy, somewhat bitter, somewhat sour flavor to it. It certainly looks amazing with its magenta purple growing tips, you can't deny it that! It also is highly nutritious. Here's another blog article about lambsquarters and some other tasty things you can do with the leaves and seeds.

All the vegetables were chopped and sorted into bowls and plates according to when they would go onto the pizza.

First was the pesto of basil, garlic, huatusco peppers chopped with the mezzaluna very fine and olive oil as the "sauce" layer. Then the big vegetables of squash, broccoli, and leafy greens of kale and radicchio and sliced multiplier onion. The whole pie was drizzled with olive oil and a dash of salt before it was placed on my new copper pizza pie pan (I got it at an antique store in town for $10! What a deal!) in the oven and baked at 400degF for at least 20 minutes.

In the last 5 minutes I tossed on the herbs of summer savory, purslane, magenta lambsquarters, oregano flowers.

The meal:

The new copper pie pan was a success. The pizza turned out delicious and was accompanied by our homemade pickled carrots and some olives. The purslane and the magenta lambsquarters sort of melded into the other veggies so we couldn't place them taste wise individually, but it was still a tasty "weedy" meal. Yum!

What weeds have you cooked with?