One way to get rid of dandelions is to eat 'em all gone.
Dandelion leaves can be added to salads and soups, or cooked the same as greens with bacon. Directions online at recipes.com and other sites call for dandelion fritters and pizza, even pickled and fried dandelion blossoms.
The Great Dandelion Cookbook collects recipes from the National Dandelion Cookoff, an event held each May in Dover, Ohio (more information is available at dandyblend.com). Dandy Blend is a brand of dandelion root coffee, a trendy drink where trends come from -- mainly, California.
"Forget matcha [tea], it's dandelion coffee now," according to Bloomberg Businessweek. If so, then goodbye to powdered green tea, to which Arkansans never really said hello, and hello to this coffeelike brew made of dandelion, barley, rye, chicory and beets, with no caffeine.
And wine -- most of all wine, according to late author Ray Bradbury's autobiographical classic, Dandelion Wine (1957).
"The wine was summer caught and stoppered," Bradbury writes -- in this case, the very essence of warm days and small-town childhood, set back to be savored in winter.
Dandelion wine is most often a homemade concoction of dandelion flowers and other ingredients, generally including oranges, lemons and sugar -- boiled, fermented, bottled, aged. Recipe sources include Cooking With Flowers by Miche Bacher (Quirk Books), and epicurious.com.
The light-colored wine might be called more accurately a liqueur: a sweet, fruity sip, something special -- never to be guzzled.
For the first chill of fall, as Bradbury prescribes, for the cold days of winter doldrums, "a thimbleful of dandelion wine is indicated."
-- Ron Wolfe
HomeStyle on 07/23/2016