Miner's Lettuce

I visited Nathaniel and Ariel at the Farm School last weekend, and they sent me home with a jar of leaf lard, two bottles of homebrew kombucha, a homemade chutney, a shopping bag stuffed with baby kale and miner's lettuce we'd picked, and memories of a fine stinging-nettle pesto. So, score!

Miner's lettuce, or claytonia, is really not at all like lettuce (it has long stems and small leaves). It's a native of California that the forty-niners ate to stave off scurvy. (It's probably more commonly foraged than deliberately grown.) People think it has a kind of spinachy taste and use it mainly in salads; I snapped off the leaves into a glass bowl and let the potluck guests take it from there.