Little known greens, other edible parts of plants, & how to cook them,

A response on my last post got me to thinking about all the times I've heard people mention eating the leaves/greens/seeds of plants that were commonly grown for other edible purposes i.e. fruit, root, seed pods, etc.

I've heard about eating radish leaves, beet leaves, carrot tops, radish seed pods, sweet potato leaves, even young squash leaves, & vine tips.  However, I have no experience doing this.  

Does anyone out there have good recipes for this, or at least an explanation of how to go about it?

Do you know of other edible parts of commonly grown veggies to get more food value from our harvests?  

Here are some suggestions to get everyone's appetites flowing:

https://www.thekitchn.com/fresh-tip-use-tomato-leaves-to-123288

https://permies.com/t/58961/culinary-tomato-foliage


https://permies.com/t/157332/Fig-Leaves

Cy Cobb wrote:Does anyone out there have good recipes for this, or at least an explanation of how to go about it?

Do you know of other edible parts of commonly grown veggies to get more food value from our harvests?

I regularly harvest beet greens, rutabaga leaves, turnip leaves, and radish greens along with the usual greens such as mustard, arugula, pak choi and chard. I tried rutabaga leaves for the first time last year and really liked them. Even more than the root.

I typically steam the greens or use in stir-fry. Some I eat in salads. The turnip and radish leaves tend to be bristly when raw but that goes away when cooked. Most of the common vegetables in the cabbage family are good lightly steamed.

Before you try something new, look it up and make sure there aren't any potential issues then try steaming them with a little butter or fry with some bacon grease.  Mmm. Bacon. This way you'll know if you like the flavor. Some greens can be bitter but good or too bitter for your taste.

One plant green I don't use is parsnip. I've had the phototoxicity reaction on my skin from the leaves of this plant. I've looked up the edibility of this green and there is some mixed information. I definitely wouldn't eat it raw. Not sure about steamed. Maybe someone else here has tried it.

Some other dishes you can try:
-Collards and ham hocks
-Saag. If anyone has a good saag recipe please share. We love the stuff from the restaurants but can't seem to reproduce it at home.

Cy--

Beet greens are pretty common in central/eastern European cuisine. If you have a hard time finding recipes keep in mind that "chard" is just a beet that is grown for leaves instead of roots, so you can use beet greens in any chard recipe.  An easy side dish is simmering the chopped stems in salted for a few minutes, then adding the leaves for a few minutes more, and serving dressed with a splash of oil and vinegar or lemon juice.

Turnip and radish greens are pretty much interchangeable. They are similar to mustard greens in terms of how to cook them. Not as tender as spinach, not as tough as kale. I remove the stems except on very young leaves. It's easiest to fold the leaf so you are holding both vertical edges of the leaf in one hand, then rip the stem off with your other hand.

Forager Chef has a book with recipes using other unusual greens you might enjoy: https://foragerchef.com/the-forager-chefs-book-of-flora-2/

While not exactly always green when I cook I try to use everything and not have any parts to put in the trash.

Broccoli stems, the rind on spaghetti squash, etc.

Here is a thread that I did on zero waste:

https://permies.com/t/216892/Scrap-Cooking

And Kena Landry made this one:

https://permies.com/t/174706/Tips-recipes-reduce-food-waste

here’s a blog post about eating pumpkins/squash shoots and leaves. the main thing to know is to peel them first before cooking.

https://foragerchef.com/squash-and-pumpkin-shoots/

Thanks everyone for the reference links & info.  This is exactly what I was looking for.  Now to get some time to read through them all...

i have about 100 daikon radishes coming up. Usually my rabbits are thrilled to eat the leaves for me, but when there are any left, this is my favorite thing to do with them (we eat it with rice, since I learned to cook in Japan, but I bet it would be equally good mixed with boiled potatoes or sweet potatoes, or even used as a sandwich spread with something flavorful like ham, or maybe even eggs-- might have to investigate that....)
https://www.justonecookbook.com/daikon-leaves-furikake/

We also regularly eat chayote tendrils/shoots, similarly from pumpkins, cucumbers, squash, etc, stir fried up they're quite nice.
And how could I forget sweet potato leaves? The smaller/more tender the better. Supposedly quite healthy as well. Same way I'd make chard/spinach (fried up with garlic and olive oil, or else stir fried with garlic and soy).

One of my favourite combos is young squash leaves and vine tips with kale. About half and half. I steam them lightly, then eat with a bit of black bean sauce. The squash leaves get so tender and the kale keeps a bit of bite, which I find is a really nice texture combination.

Anne Miller,

I have a strong aversion toward wasteful practices in my own life.  One thing that I've recently discovered (that I'm sure everyone else already knew) is how to make a very good vegetable stock from the off-cuts of my veggies.  

Every time I prep my veggies for recipes, I save the trimmings (root ends/tips/skins of veggies) in my freezer.  Once I have a full gallon bag or so, I just dump the contents in a pot of water & boil for a while.  Remove the trimmings (can still compost) & strain into another stock pot to make soup right then, or freeze for later.  I generally use celery, onion, carrot, peppers, too small bits of garlic, etc.

Many years ago a seed company sent me a free sample of beet seeds along with my order.  I hated beets from childhood and never ate them as an adult.  But not one to waste things, I dutifully planted those seeds.  The packet included a recipe to harvest the beets and greens young, chop them all up and saute them in olive oil with garlic.  I did so, not anticipating enjoying them (but keeping my dog in mind for the "leftovers," LOL)

Those young beets with their greens and garlic were absolutely delicious!  Now I use whole mature beets along with their greens (not the larger stems although I'm sure they are edible too) regularly.  I'll take two whole beets, plus the greens from 3-4 more, and chop them and saute them with garlic in olive oil.  To me the greens are the best part.  So the additional beet roots go to my chickens, who love them.  

Don't overlook the flowers. Some delete fragrance from that evening primrose that wilt any way as soon as the hot sun hits it or those petals that will fall off soon anyway. Some give spice like nasturtium or colors like hollyhocks. Some delicious ones are passed by because we are used to using them before they bloom, like broccoli, kale, arugula.

I'll get around to trying sunflower buds eventually

Oooh, great topic! This is something I have been trying to do more of lately, to use more of the plant. This is our third year of signing up for a local farmer's CSA, and I have challenged myself to use everything he brings us. For me, I don't usually use recipes but rather just throw things together.

Last night, I fried up a bunch of greens both from the CSA and from our yard first. This included some dried stinging nettle leaves, dried goutweed, radish leaves and turnip leaves. I had never tried the radish and turnip leaves before! I also added in the turnips themselves (small white ones), along with fresh thyme and oregano from the deck. Once they had cooked some, I added a pound of ground beef and sliced bell peppers and mushrooms. After all that was nearly cooked, I also added a bit of frozen broccoli and cauliflower, some sour cream, cream cheese and marble cheese for a lovely cream sauce.

My husband loved it and said the mushrooms stuck out. He did not suspect the weeds from the garden or strange leaves. We have agreed that I won't tell him about the "weird stuff," as he calls it. So, I get to feed him all kinds of nutritional goodness, as long as he is not conscious of it.

This is one of my favourite things to bring up when I talk about multiple yields and why I only grow limited numbers of nightshade vegetables.

Hands down my favourite summer green is Squash greens, especially from pattypan squashes. I also like the thicker, older stems where the leaves aren't nearly so appealing. Split them in half and slice them thinly exactly like how you might treat celery. They have a mild flavour and by slicing the fibres lengthwise you get a really tender vegetable for soups, stir fry, anywhere you'd use cooked celery.

Okra greens are amazing when young. Okra has 1000 uses.

Radishes have some of the most delicious of all greens but they tend to catch a lot of dirt. I like to soak them in cold water with a pinch of vinegar for a few minutes to really pull all the dirt out of the leaves. They shrink so much when cooked! Seed pods are equally desirable and hands down the most reliable yield when it gets stupid hot outside. My watermelon radishes rebelled last year with a late heat wave but I got easily a few hundred pods from a dozen radish plants

Carrot leaves make a great pesto. They are a good green but are fairly tough. If you want to use them you're gonna want to pound the daylights out of them or stew for a long time. Flavour is amaaaaazing.

Peppers - this is one hardly anyone talks about. Peppers, like bell peppers, have edible but very strongly flavoured greens. They are *Not* a solanine heavy green and are only distantly related to the other nightshades. I'd personally always cook these ones. I love the flavour, the wife can't stand them. Worth a try.

Sweet potato greens. Never grown them, I'm too north, but I buy them at the local asian market occasionally. Fantastic green. Flavour profile, texture, its all just really good. Not much to cooking them, just a quick wilt in a steamer, stir fry, or thrown into a soup last minute. Pasta sauce also.

I've heard that cowpeas and runner beans have edible greens. I need to try both this summer.

Fava bean greens. I adore fava beans, they are the gift that keeps giving. The greens make good pesto, cook into anything, the beans are edible in lots of ways. Garden peas have edible greens as well with identical uses to favas but much more PEA flavoured.

There's a million more but this is what I"m thinking of right now

My grandmother (Italian) always made stuffed zucchini blossoms ...

https://www.wellseasonedstudio.com/fried-stuffed-squash-blossoms/  this recipe seems about right, except Im fairly sure she used rosemary instead of sage or just salt and pepper

Jan White wrote:One of my favourite combos is young squash leaves and vine tips with kale. About half and half. I steam them lightly, then eat with a bit of black bean sauce. The squash leaves get so tender and the kale keeps a bit of bite, which I find is a really nice texture combination.

Jan, I had no idea you could eat the squash leaves! My mind is blown. Thanks!

My grandmother (Italian) always made stuffed zucchini blossoms ...

https://www.wellseasonedstudio.com/fried-stuffed-squash-blossoms/  this recipe seems about right, except Im fairly sure she used rosemary instead of sage or just salt and pepper

Cat, a neighbour just informed me that you can eat the flowers! I tried it last night and they were nice.

Hands down my favourite summer green is Squash greens, especially from pattypan squashes. I also like the thicker, older stems where the leaves aren't nearly so appealing. Split them in half and slice them thinly exactly like how you might treat celery. They have a mild flavour and by slicing the fibres lengthwise you get a really tender vegetable for soups, stir fry, anywhere you'd use cooked celery.

Daniel, sounds good! Nice tip for cooking.

A friend taught me dead simple palak paneer method and it works for any and all edible greens. It's especially a great tactic when the green are a bit fibrous, or if it's too fiddly to pick tender leaves off fibrous stems (like with lambsquarters/fat hen).

The past couple of years, I've been trying new wild greens I've been told are edible. When I cook them as explained to me but still find them fibrous, I just make palak paneer instead. If I'm planning, I'll make it with:
• spinach or chard.
• I've made it with garden Brassicas like kale, mustard greens etc, but I prefer those cooked other ways.
But I've also made it with:
• lambsquarters (excellent! And you can just include the stringy stems, at least the smaller ones.)
• other garden weeds: pigweed amaranth, mallow, and anything else edible out there.
• garlic chives (which were too fibrous when I just blanched, chopped up and sauteed as I'd been told)
• nettles
• red amaranth (It had grown rampantly like a weed after I planted it the previous year. It lost all its red in the boiling water, and made a bright green, delicious, palak paneer. Oh and it was fine even after it had started to flower: very easy to pick large leaves off, and they were too fibrous cooked any other way).
• Perennial pepperweed, Lepidium latifolium (a bitter green that I collect every year in spring and process to leach out the bitterness, but then it ends up kinda bland. But it's easy to get lots, so I need a variety of dishes to use it up in).

Palak Paneer Method
I puree in a countertop blender, which is called a "mixie" or "mixer" in India, but is a strong countertop blender with steel jars instead of plastic. A food processor or immersion blender might work fine.
1) Blanch the greens in a pot of boiling salted water. Couple minutes, maybe up to 5.
2) Drain them (and cool before putting in the blender).
3) Sautee plenty of onions and optional garlic. Use the oil or fat of your choice, whatever you prefer: we like ghee but have used olive oil, butter or yak fat at times. If the greens have a bitter edge that you want to dull, make sure the volume of sliced uncooked onions is at least half the volume of blanched and drained greens. If the greens are mild or you love their flavor alone, you can use less onions than that.
3.5) Edited to add: Some people add ginger, garlic, tomatoes and spices like asafoetida or garam masala into the sautéing stuff. I find it's usually just as good without those.
4) Cool and then puree the greens and sautéed stuff until smooth.  
Add just enough cream, or milk, or other liquid to be able to puree.
Salt to taste. Add a fresh green chilli or ground black pepper if desired.
5) To make it into palak paneer, add small cubes of paneer, either uncooked or deep fried till crispy golden on the outside. Of course tofu is fine too. Typically eaten with rice or chapattis, but stands well as a side dish with anything.
I've used this puree as a pasta sauce, with or without paneer, and with grated cheese on top.
6) The puree freezes well, so if you happen to come into a huge volume of some green leaf that you can't eat soon enough (eg weeding a rampant weed from the garden), make a big batch and freeze it in portions that you'll want to take out one at a time. You can freeze it with the paneer/tofu in, or just freeze the puree and add those later.

Robin Katz wrote:-Saag. If anyone has a good saag recipe please share. We love the stuff from the restaurants but can't seem to reproduce it at home.

Robin, everything on this thread is a saag. As far as I can tell, in India saag simply means cooked green leaves. In some regions up near me if you ask for saag from a vegetable seller he'll point you to the collard greens (well, it seems like collards) but if you ask what any green leaf he's selling is, he'll call it saag. Or if you are discussing say, turnips or beets with someone, they might say "Oh yes and you can make saag from the leaves, too." Actually my region is not Hindi speaking and does not have the word saag, but it's the lingua franca here, eg to communicate with the commercial vegetable sellers, who are Kashmiri speakers.

So I think your question is really to find out how restaurants spice and cook their saag so you can make it similarly. I suspect it might simply be that they use more oil and salt than you would have. There are hundreds of Indian recipe websites, blogs and videos online.

Rebecca, wonderful idea!  I already make several different greens recipes (aside from the beet greens I mentioned above.)  One is creamed kale & spinach with parmesan, which seems quite similar to your palak paneer.  I looked up paneer cheese and it looks very easy and fast to make.  Pureeing different greens would indeed make them more palatable especially for my Mom who has increasing trouble swallowing solid foods.   If I was cooking bitter greens I might add some fresh grated horseradish root to the cream sauce, but I haven't tried that yet.  We do love our horseradish though, I add it to homemade tartar sauces for fish so it would probably be good in a cream sauce for greens like lambsquarter which don't (to me) have a good mouthfeel/taste/texture on their own.  

For Robin Katz:  Another recipe I use is sauteing minced garlic and grated fresh ginger root in olive oil, stirring in chopped bok choi and a couple tablespoons nama shoyu, then covering and steaming that with the heat off until tender, which doesn't take long at all.  This adds quite a bit of flavor and might help with greens that aren't so tasty on their own.

I grew up adding vinegar to plain cooked spinach at the dinner table, and now I add it to Swiss chard near the end of cooking it.  That might help the flavor of some different types of leaves too.

For those who like sweetness, I roast Brussels sprouts after tossing them in a mix of olive oil, garlic powder, nama shoyu and maple syrup.  Start light on the maple syrup and nama shoyu as they really change the flavor of things.  Add more in subsequent attempts until you get a ratio you enjoy.  This could work with heavier-type green leaves/stems, or more bitter ones.  

I'm sure there are many good recipes using hot peppers out there, but my household doesn't care for the spiciness of hot peppers (except for me) so I rarely cook with them.  (I just keep a bottle of hot sauce available for use at the table!)

Hope this inspires some creative experimentation!

Broccoli leaves taste like broccoli. Pretty much all brassica flowers are eatable and tasty.  I really enjoy borage.  It's an amazing pollinator. It tastes just like cucumber. The leaves are fuzzy, so my family does like to eat them, but the flowers taste great and make a beautiful salad..
Great post, I've learned a lot.

One of my favorite sauteed greens is cauliflower leaves. I often get them from the veggie store, where they just get thrown away.
I sautee some garlic in the pressure cooker, add the chopped leaves and some soy sauce, mix and close and cook til a whistle, remove from heat, remove pressure (force open) for toothsome greens or natural open for softer ones. Top with some sesame oil.
If you slice/chop them fine, cooked this way makes an excellent filling for dumplings, potstickers, steamed buns, etc. Tastes like cauliflower.

So much great knowledge being shared here!  Thank you all for your individual contributions.  I am very excited to try all these new ideas as opportunities arise.  

For those of you that eat the squash vine tips/young leaves/older leaf stems, how do you deal with the spines?  I'm currently growing a lot of winter squashes & am nearly to the point of limiting their growth by pruning the tips.  I have several varieties growing, but they all have spines.  Some are as thick & sharp as small rose thorns, some are like hairs, & some are somewhere in between.  Do you scrape them off with a knife before cooking?  Is there a video or how-to instructions somewhere?  Like so many things I do, I kind of have to learn as I go, but nothing beats proper instruction by folks such as yourselves that have real experience.

Here is a video with a recipe for preparation of squash leaves and stems:

My chinese SIL once prepared stems for us but she put them in a stew.

For other greens as chards, this is one of my favourite recipes and makes it easy to get your dose of "dark leafy veggies":
(first recipe)
with lots of Parmesan and some chili flakes.

For any other leafy greens (especially mustard and similar) I like to blanch and then fry them Chinese style with lots of garlic and a bit of soy sauce (like this: )

Very useful video's Anita, am going to send to a few fellow vegans, another great thing about the green leaves is generally they are the healthiest parts of plants for human and animal too, I have bought cress at supermarket and then last few bits that are leggy have planted up in a tub and they get huge and are fully edible uncooked like the cress itself!.

Rebecca Norman wrote:...dead simple palak paneer method and it works for any and all edible greens. It's especially a great tactic when the green are a bit fibrous, or if it's too fiddly to pick tender leaves off fibrous stems (like with lambsquarters/fat hen).

Nice! I've made palak paneer with both lambsquarters and sheep sorrel. both were great, but I was fastidious about removing the stems. I think I'd still want to remove the fat center stalk from a meter-high lambsquarters, but I'm going to try your method with the smaller stems.

Donna Lynn wrote:For those who like sweetness, I roast Brussels sprouts after tossing them in a mix of olive oil, garlic powder, nama shoyu and maple syrup.

Neat. I'm not much into sweet, though a little bit with chiles is sometimes nice. But I make exactly the same Brussels sprouts dish except I use dark miso where you use syrup. My wife and kids like sweet better, so maybe I'll try some maple and see what everyone thinks.

Loofah Seeds Edible?

I can't find information online about loofah (luffa) seeds. I have the smooth, not spiney kind. Can someone tell if there seeds are edible? If course they are inside the fruit cooked like a zucchini, but I'm thinking dried and roasted like pumpkin seeds? They produce way more seeds than I need for replanting every year, and it seems a shame to waste them. Thanks for any tips.

Laurie Burton wrote:Loofah Seeds Edible?

I can't find information online about loofah (luffa) seeds. I have the smooth, not spiney kind. Can someone tell if there seeds are edible? If course they are inside the fruit cooked like a zucchini, but I'm thinking dried and roasted like pumpkin seeds? They produce way more seeds than I need for replanting every year, and it seems a shame to waste them. Thanks for any tips.

https://tropical.theferns.info/viewtropical.php?id=Luffa+aegyptiaca

assuming this is the correct species, UTP lists it as having edible seeds when roasted. I wouldn't consume them raw. The seeds can also be pressed for oil, I have no certainty what the fatty acid profile would be - - likely similar to pumpkin and watermelon seeds.

I use carrot greens mixed with parsley for tabouli, love broccoli stems in soup (must peel), and many of the other things people mentioned.

One recipe I got from an elderly Lebanese woman was for fennel fronds and stems. You take the fennel stems and slice them and saute them, then chop and add the leafy fronds, then add lentils and water/stock. The proportions can vary - either very beany with just a few fronds, or very frond-y with just a few beans. A little salt and simmer until the lentils are tender and have absorbed the water. It makes a kind of warm salad. We usually toss with a little olive oil and/or lemon juice.

This is what I made tonight and I used something I've never cooked with before: beet stems.

This isn't a great picture but I fried up beet stems, goutweed, cauliflower, lettuce, zucchini, fresh thyme and oregano in butter. I then added cream cheese and chopped sausage. It was very tasty. The beet stems really lost their strong flavour and blended in nicely with the other greens.

I want to add another recipe I learned in India for edible garden weeds and wild greens. This one is from Ladakh in the Indian Himalayas, and is called གྲང་ཐུར་ tangthur. It's typically made with lambsquarters / fat hen, or with foraged wild sedum. It can be made with any wild edible greens that lend themselves to a quick boil.

Lambsquarters is Chenopodium album, UK fat hen, Hindi bathua, Ladakhi snyiu.

I usually make tangthur with lambsquarters. The method is very easy, and I find it compulsively yummy, even to guests who are uninterested in wild edibles. It's great with brown bread, or over any kind of cooked grain, even if the grain got cooked to a mush. In Ladakh it's typically eaten with barley polenta, the local staple food. It could be used as a side dish to cool spicy food.

• Large handful of lambsquarters picked before it's gone to seed.
• Plain natural yogurt or buttermilk.
• Oil for light sautéing.
• Onion.
• Optional green chilli or powdered chilli.
• Salt.

1. Harvest some C. album. It's easier if you take larger leaves and shoot ends from vigorous plants that are growing fast with large leaves. Stems can be fibrous, so when the leaves are small, it's a little too fiddly to pick them.
2. Boil the leaves for a couple of minutes till dark green, then lift them out of the pot with a slotted spoon to leave grit behind.
3. Chop the onion fine and sauté. Add optional chilli (fresh green or dried red).
4. Chop the drained greens, add to the onions, and sauté for a while.
5. Cool for a couple of minutes, then add to yogurt or buttermilk. Salt to taste.

Some people make it whiter with more yogurt, and others make it denser with the greens. I like it with more greens. I think aromatic herbs are sometimes crushed in the mortar and pestle and added raw without boiling, but I haven't made it that way yet.

I've also made it with nettles and garlic mustard. When first mixed up, the nettles seem to still be coarse in the mouth, but if left overnight in the fridge, it's delicious the next day.

I've become really into using every edible part of the plant.  So everything we grow we eat as much of the plant as possible, including things we didn't grow but which "showed up" and become our friends, this year its been mostly chickweed with a bit of nipplewort so far, but I have some lady's thumb, bitter cress and other little friends coming in unbidden to join my purposefully planted things.  And dandylyons too.  We tend to eat greens in salads or sautee them with other things, but I'm inspired by some of these recipies I'm seeing here to branch out even farther.