Do you make homemade pasta? It can be rewarding and makes a chewy, dense and flavorful pasta to go along with (especially) very strong or bold sauces.

Here's a twist: add wild seeds to your dough. Adding wild seeds to your pasta dough is very easy and actually is quite nutritious. One of my favorite weeds/seeds to include in my bread and pasta doughs is lamb’s quarters, Chenopodium album. This impressively tall plant starts as innocent short tufts of grey-green in the garden, poking out from among the spinach and squash seedlings. But before you know it, the fast-growing plants are waist-high and weedy looking, and if you resist the urge to pull them, they proudly tower over the garden as 7-foot-high “trees” covered in edible nutty leaves and bursting with seeds.

(Bottom line: when you see these sprouting in the spring, leave them in place because, by fall, you'll have a bounty of edible leaves and seeds.)

How to Use Lamb's Quarter

Lamb’s quarter leaves make a wonderful salad (either raw or lightly steamed) and they are very nutritious and provide a light spinach-like flavor. The seeds can be easily harvested, dried, and saved to be used whole just as you would use textured vegetable protein (TVP), sprinkled on oatmeal, granola and yogurt. For breakfast use, I like to mix a small container of lamb's quarter seeds with cinnamon and a sprinkling of sugar. Keep this tightly lidded and use by the teaspoon. The seeds should be dried (but can certainly be used fresh); dry them on a newsprint or screen to ensure they don't mold before you use them.

Lamb's quarter seeds can also be ground into a fine flour and used in pasta (see the step-by-step recipe below). The seeds are also delicious blended with homemade tomato sauce ladled on top or stirred into basil pesto and garlic sauces. I have found that noodles made with lamb's quarter seed flour are very soft and airy, so it’s perfect for a spin-off of Italian gnocchi.

Holly’s Lamb’s Quarter Pasta Recipe

Harvest lamb’s quarter seeds by stripping the seeds off the branches into a paper bag. Spread them on a newspaper to dry for a day; once dry, grind them in a food processor or blender until they become a fine meal or flour. Collect about 1 cup of lamb’s quarter flour.

Ingredients:

3 cups semolina

1 cup lamb’s quarter flour

½ cup white all-purpose flour

1 egg

½ cup olive oil

1 ½ cups water 

Step 1: Combine all the ingredients in a large bowl. Mix by hand until the dough is well-blended and soft, but it needs to hold together. If it’s too loose, add more semolina; if it’s too thick, add more oil and water. Keep the ratio of semolina to other flour at about 2:1. Freeze any unused lamb’s quarter flour and use it anytime you need extra flour or want a little wildness to come through!

Step 2: Allow the dough to rest for 10 minutes, covered with a damp cloth.

Step 3: Roll the dough out onto a floured surface and slice it into 1-inch strips; run these through a pasta machine (I use a cavatelli maker) or cut off a knuckle-sized chunk and roll into shape (hence the name gnocchi, for knuckle).

Step 4: Cook the gnocchi in batches in salted boiling water for 5-8 minutes, or until all the gnocchi are floating in the pot.

Step 5: Scoop out with a sieve and place in a pot. Drizzle each cooked batch with olive oil. Continue with the rest of the batches.

Step 6: Enjoy with basil pesto or tomato sauce.

Note: The pasta will be a slightly green color, a little darker than your normal pasta thanks to the lamb’s quarter flour, and the “little pillows” will be soft and full, a perfect complement to a crusty baguette and a crisp salad.

For more delicious herbal recipes by Holly, get the book The Healing Kitchen here.

The Healing Kitchen (Llewellyn Worldwide Publishers)