Miner’s lettuce

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At the Wednesday Santa Monica farmers market last week, under a low marine layer that made everyone clutch their coffee cups that much tighter, James Birch of Florabella Farms had an overflowing crate of gorgeous greens sitting out on his table. The greens were next to a small mountain of breakfast and plum radishes and a thatch of rapini -- the stinging nettles had been snapped up by chefs earlier -- and were, at least to me, quite unidentifiable. They looked like a particularly verdant and fleshy kind of nasturtium.

‘It’s miner’s lettuce,’ explained Birch. The plant, which is in the purslane family, was named for the Sierra Nevada gold miners who used to eat it in the early spring, when it finally appeared after the difficult winters, to prevent scurvy.

It’s gorgeous stuff, but what to do with it? A few stalls down, Campanile chef Mark Peel -- who had just picked some up from Birch -- supplied the answer. A salad, said Peel, of miner’s lettuce, toasted and crushed walnuts, crumbled Stilton cheese, a simple lemon-honey-mustard vinaigrette and some snipped chives. ‘Five ingredients, 10 minutes,’ pronounced Peel. Well, five unless you count the vinaigrette ingredients, he allowed, but still, that’s pretty simple. It was. Utterly delicious and very pretty too (see the picture at left). Birch has been bringing miner’s lettuce to the Wednesday and Saturday Santa Monica markets every spring for years. ‘As long as we keep getting some rain, it’ll keep going for the next month or so,’ said Birch. ‘This is the kind of weather it likes a lot.’

Miner’s lettuce, $5 per lb. from Florabella Farms.

-- Amy Scattergood

Photos by Amy Scattergood