I had my first full grown New Zealand spinach salad with goat cheese and a dash of aged balsamic vinegar last night. The spinach is tasty, but has a thicker texture that the normal bloomsdale spinach. I had never heard of the green until I tried to figure out why my regular spinach bolted last year. Alas, DC is far to hot for regular spinach, but local gardeners recommened New Zealand Spinach and Malabar as a close subsitute.
Capatain Cook brought back the near-spinach plant, genus Tetragonia, to London after the 1770 expedition. It remains a staple of Maori cooking, and it is well suited to warm moist climates. Although DC only purports to the first adjective, my plants have come in well. One can learn more about the plant at the following links below. Although I was a bit disturbed that the Wikipedia entry suggested that one needed to blanch the veggies to get rid of mild toxins, none of the other resources intruct this, and I still feel find this morning.
Wikipedia's "New Zealand Spinach"
University of Florida's Extension Office on "New Zealand Spinach"
Garden Guide's "New Zealand Spinach"
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3 comments:
I too have been eating NZ Spinach without blanching, for years and am still alive to tell it.
We live in SW Missouri, where the summer heat bolts leaf spinach varieties and the lightest frost takes them out early. This New Zealand spinach comes up early and dies off last and is renewable. We cook it with a little onion and bacon (southern style) and eat it with cornbread. It freezes well, just chopped up and blanched for a minute or two. Also, it is our chickens' favorite green. They all start cackling and running back in forth in their run when they see me bending over the NZ spinach patch. Our eggs are probably more nutritious with this in their diet.
I forgot to mention that our tetragonium patch is now self-seeding from year to year. The seeds do take a long time to germinate and the early weed sprouts can easily catch up with them in the cool spring. Soaking the seeds in warm water for 24 hours helps, but we have never seen NZ spinach seeds sprout in under 10 days.
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