Two chicks quesadillas: vegetarian with chickweed, chickpeas, feta and wild mushrooms

Finished chickweed, chickpea, feta and wild mushroom quesadilla

Like pretty much everyone, I'm sure, one of my goals in the new year is to eat better and hopefully loose weight. The second is hard, but the first is relatively easy, if you devote the time and effort into it, and treat it as an investment in yourself.

Of course, that's easier said than done. 

One problem I've always had was being so busy in the work week that I just get some fast lunch, usually something fried. Then I work late, so I don't feel like cooking when I get home. . . Eating out can quickly get out of control.

Enter the meal prep. I've decided to take time when I can, on the weekends, and make healthy, easy to re-heat meals that I can eat at my desk if I absolutely have to. Last week's mushroom pizza was a good one, and so is this week's chickweed, wild mushroom, chickpea and feta quesadilla, high protein, healthy fat and quality carbs, clocking in at under 400 calories. 

This vegetarian meal can easily be made vegan, if you use vegan cheese, or omit the cheese entirely. 

Chickweed, at the perfect stage for harvest

Chickweed, Stellaria media, is a super nutritious wild plant, which is finding it's way back into cultivation. Eat chickweed for a lot of vitamin C, as well as B vitamins and beta carotene. It's also got more minerals than your average plant, boasting high amounts of calcium, magnesium and potassium.

Because of the CHICKweed and CHICKpeas, I'm calling this the Two Chick Quesadilla!

Sweet potato colcannon with wild greens

Just a quick post today, I mixed this up yesterday with stuff hanging around in my fridge.

Colcannon is an Irish side dish of boiled cabbage or kale mixed into mashed potatoes. But in this wildcrafted take, I used healthier sweet potatoes and foraged greens (in this case, chickweed, but you could try it with lots of things). 

It's really simple, but it's the little additions to the mashed potatoes which make it so good: caramelized onion, lots of garlic and butter, a splash of cream. And of course, your wild greens. 

No recipe really needed: you should play around and find what works for you, but here is what I did:

Foraged Pizza with Chickweed and Caramelized Greenbriar

I was having foraged pizza envy, after seeing a post by @nibblingonnature on Instagram. I realized it had been a long, long time since I last made a foraged pizza. That one had had dryad's saddle on it. It had been amazing and I completely forgot to take pictures or make a post.

Homemade pizza is a Good Friday tradition with my in-laws. As the last Friday in Lent, you can't eat meat. Everyone gets together at my husband's aunt's house, makes a ton of pizzas, with 3-4 toppings, and then stuffs themselves silly. It's a good time, and a great meal. My favorite of those pies is the white pizza with cartelized onions.

They also make another dish which I would share, but it's a family secret. It's called grass pie and it uses a ton of dandelion greens! It's really heavenly.

Of course, having moved away from New Jersey, I didn't get to participate in this year's Good Friday, but I was still craving pizza. A weekend forage netted a bunch of Greenbriar shoots (Latin name: Smilax, also known as catbriar).

The tender new growth of greenbriar is edible

Foraged Chickweed and Mushroom Omelette

A mushroom omelette is one of my favorite ways to eat chickweed, because the flavor how very well with egg and most cheeses, and a light sauté keeps the freshness and crispness of the chickweed but fixes the textural issues of the hairy stems.

I prefer this dish with wild mushrooms, especially oysters, puffballs or milky caps, but I didn't have any of those so I used your basic white buttons. Half of a package will do for one omelette. I used Swiss cheese here, but goat cheese, asiago, Parmesan, and provolone all work.

It's simple to make, healthy and comes together quickly.

Foraging: Identifying Wild Edible Chickweed

Many people describe chickweed (Stellaria media) as their favorite wild edible green of spring. Many gardeners consider it a difficult-to-remove, annoying weed. Those gardeners just haven't tried it yet!

The foodie world is starting to follow along with the former group, and chickweed is showing up on menus of restaurants that focus on seasonal and/or local organic produce. Chickweed is also starting to show up in places like farmers markets and in the form of herbal supplements and teas at Whole Foods.

There's really everything to like about chickweed: it has a mild, fresh sweetness which some people compare to young corn or iceberg or boston lettuce, it grows in super abundance, easy to harvest and quick to grow back in the early spring when little else is growing, fairly easy to identify AND it even looks pretty!

Technically, chickweed isn't native to the Americas, so it's also an invasive species. Of course, it's been here for generations, so any ecological damage has already been done, but if you're into invasivore eating (eating invasive species) that's something to consider as well.

So let's get started on how to find, identify, harvest, prepare and eat this tasty little weed!

Identification difficulty: Beginner