Let’s expand the definition of recs until it snaps in half.

Since I love to see dandelions and other people don’t, I’ve been trying to cook a bit with them. I was just feeding them to the chickens and lizard, but there’s only so much they can eat.

The really nice thing about dandelion is it’s very easy to identify. There’s a similar yellow flower you might see occasionally, but it’s on a thin, fuzzy stalk. Just ignore that one. Once you get used to finding the flowers, you’ll learn to recognize the rest of the plant pretty quickly.

Online, there’s a lot of talk about making sure the flowers are clean and untouched by human pollutants and found in a forest full of unicorns who blessed each individually, but honestly, I figure that road dust and stuff on them can’t be much worse than breathing it in in the first place. Don’t collect next to particularly busy roads, don’t collect anywhere the soil’s contaminated by lead, and if you’re nervous, get dandelions growing on hillsides rather than gullies. A quick rinse should get any dust off. If you’re worried about pesticide use, an easy rule of thumb is to collect in areas that contain lots of dandelion, rather than mostly grass with a couple flowers. The more dandelion, the less likely anyone’s bothering to treat the grass.

Mostly when I hear people talk about dandelions it’s to use the greens in salad, which given the leaves are bitter doesn’t sound appealing. But you can avoid that by cooking and by using the flowers, and the flowers are what people are usually complaining about in the first place.

The first thing I tried was dandelion omelet, which was just dandelion heads and some stem fried for a bit and then mixed with egg. It was surprisingly mild, less than spinach. I suspect you could substitute it in a lot of things for spinach, actually. I also threw it into stirfry with no ill effects, but my stirfrys are 50% salt so that’s true about a lot of things. The only weird thing about eating the flowers is how airy they are.

Since cooking worked out so well, I decided to try dandelion fritters next. Cup of milk, cup of flour, mixed with an egg. Dip flowers in the batter and fry. Some recipes also suggest making it half corn meal, which I found was an improvement. Really, whatever kind of batter you like should be fine. All the recipes are based on it being an open flower, but I had a big gap between harvest time and cooking time, so mine were largely closed, and I also threw in some handfuls of flowers I’d stripped the petals from, which were more bitter but not much. The fritters tasted pretty good, but better covered in honey. Mom disagreed and said they were better plain. Butter might also be interesting, I didn’t think to try it.

From there, there’s veggy burgers, which is a proper recipe. You want a cup of petals to a cup of flour, an egg, 1/4 cup milk, and a cut onion. Personally I only like onion that’s been cooked into undeath first, so I fried that up first. I also substituted 1/4 bread crumbs for some of the flour. Mix everything together into batter, fry. The first batch tasted good but a bit bland so I added some onion salt. The internet claimed these should be treated as burgers and slathered with condiments – that tasted good as well, but the patties’ flavor is delicate enough that when you stick ketchup on top you mostly taste the ketchup. I’m not sure how much of their flavor is really from the dandelion, since the egg and onion are more noticeable.

The petals are the real time consuming bit. The internet suggests a bunch of stuff, and probably the only one that actually works is just cutting the base off with a knife- you’ll still have some green bits, but it should be okay. What worked best for me was breaking the flower in half, then digging my nail in right above the immature seeds and dragging to pull the petals out. I just did it while doing other stuff that didn’t involve my hands. Listen to an audiobook or watch not particularly interesting shows or glare at others. You could also try drafting small children, but I found they were pretty sloppy and got green bits in the mix.

I liked the burgers and so did my family, but I’m not sure they were worth the effort of getting the petals. I’ll have to try the cutting method and see how much it speeds things up.

Cream of dandelion soup is another one that asks for petals, although apparently it depends on the recipe and there are even some versions that just use greens. Since it also asks for buds, I just used flowers and called it a day. Two cups flowers, two cups greens – I ended up closer to three cups flowers to a single cup of greens. Chop both of them up. I used the greens left from the petal-gathering. Boil the greens twice, pouring off the water each time to lessen the bitterness, then add cold water a third time and let it sit until you need it. If you’re using new delicate leaves, you might be able to skip this, but I was using stems, so I wanted to be thorough. Meanwhile fry a cup of chopped onion/leek/scallion/etc with a teaspoon’s worth of garlic and whatever oil you need to keep it from burning. I used onion and as I said, I like it reduced to caramelized goo first. When that’s done to your satisfaction, add two cups of water and the four cups of dandelion, then a teaspoon salt. Simmer for an hour, then add a cup of cream. You can probably do it with milk if you use less water/cook off the water you add. Some recipes don’t use any milk at all. You can also use broth in place of water, include a cooked carrot, or add cheese. A bunch of the recipes also suggest the final step be to throw the whole thing in a blender. Since I didn’t cut them up too well and blenders are fun, I blended before adding the milk. The initial result was okay but sort of bitter, so I added some blended carrot and a bullion cube, which mellowed the taste. I think making them with just the flowers would have been wiser, and presumably petals-only would have resulted in a much milder soup. Overall, interesting but closer to the side of “edible” than “great”.

Dandelion syrup and dandelion jam are both very similar: combine dandelion petals, water, and a lot of sugar. You can also use honey but it seems wasteful to use anything else with a strong flavor, since the dandelions themselves don’t have much. I did a cup of packed petals to four cups water, bring to boil, let sit over night and then heat again and add sugar until it’s at the proper syrupy consistency, whatever you feel that might be. (Spoon some out onto a plate to check, since it’ll be much runnier while it’s hot.) I ended up using up all the sugar before getting it decently viscous, so I boiled it down for a bit. The end result tastes like sort of herbal flowery syrup and is a pretty gold color. If you’re going for jam, you then add pectin to this until it turns jammy.

The recipes say to strain the petals out afterward and discard, but that’s crazy, I didn’t go through all that effort not to eat every bit of the dumb things. I strained because I was doing syrup first and I figured they’d just settle, and reused the petals for more dandelion burgers. Straining turned out not to be necessary because the petals are light enough that the remaining ones just hovered in the jar, but maybe reusing them for burgers is worth it anyway.

If you have a candy thermometer, spare time, and a complete disrespect for what hot sugar can do to your tender flesh, you could also try cooking the sugar into dandelion hard candy.

There’s also dandelion lemonade, which is literally lemonade with dandelion flowers added. Or you can just use the flowers/greens/root boiled for tea. If you don’t want super bitter tea, only use the petals. There’s a lot of claims about the herbal effectiveness of the stuff, but I tend not to pay that too much mind. They are really nutritious, though – in general, wild stuff has more of everything save calories.