My Lucky Star?

Stellaria media
Cn: common chickweed, star chickweed

Stellaria media, known as chickweed or star chickweed, may be one of the more familiar edible weeds among the Bay Area populace. In fact, a few weeks ago when my dad and I were indulging at Gather (http://www.gatherrestaurant.com/) in Berkeley, our waiter lavishly described my dinner when serving it to me, completing his two minute long description with "...and finally topped with a fresh sprig of local chickweed." Ha! I eagerly exclaimed, "That's a weed!" In retrospect, I realize the waiter was probably offended by my blunt childlike observation. But alas, I was in fact quite joyed (and a little humored) by seeing that low-lying sprawler of shady ground being treated like a true glorified Slow Food green!

Stellaria media hails from Europe. A winter annual, S. media germinates in the fall and winter. Leaves are opposite, sessile, ovate and smooth, with margins entire. Leaves are small, about 1/2 to 1 inch long. Stems, pedicels and flower buds are hairy. Flowers have a radial perianth, composed of five deeply lobed white petals and five accompanying green sepals.

Chickweed leaves are said to taste pretty mild, similar to spinach. The seeds supposedly can be harvested, ground and made into a flour. Given I don't have four hundred years time to go harvest enough seeds for that task, I decided to stick with the leaves for now.

I found a nice patch of chickweed under my watering hose in front of my house, a very damp spot indeed. I harvested a few handfuls of the stuff, which, for a weed, is easy pretty effortless to remove from the soil. I decided to try the chickweed both raw and cooked. In a salad composed of red lettuce, tatsoi and arugula from our house garden, I added a handful of chickweed leaves. It seemed that the most labor intensive part of preparing chickweed is harvesting the leaves from the leggy stems. For my cooked chickweed, I added the leaves to red quinoa that was almost done cooking. Even though I added what seemed like a substantial amount of leaves, they soon cooked down so intensely that I had trouble even locating them in the quinoa! So, needless to say, cooking chickweed seems a little silly given the effort. However, the salad was amazing. Although, this was likely due to the stronger tasting greens and the homemade dressing of olive oil, honey, mustard & balsamic vinaigrette I splashed over it.

Ultimately, I enjoyed the chickweed, but the taste is so absolutely mild that it's easy to forget you're even eating it. If it wasn't so high in copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, silicon, zinc, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, riboflavin, niacin and thiamine, THEN maybe I'd instead be planning to feed this weed to the chickens we're soon hoping to get in our backyard rather than eating it myself. Supposedly chickens love it--hence its common name.

I think my housemate Dandelion (not a joke) summed up our whole Stellaria media experience: "Maybe if I had a bigger piece I could actually taste it."