Kale went from garnish to superstar in about a decade, and the backlash arrived almost as fast. Strip away the hype cycle and what remains is a genuinely excellent vegetable: hardy, cheap, nutritious, and — prepared with a little know-how →
Spinach may be the most useful leaf in the kitchen: it cooks in two minutes, disappears politely into soups, pasta, eggs, and smoothies, and is available fresh, frozen, or as tender baby leaves almost everywhere. It originated in Persia, traveled →
Wheatgrass is the young shoot of the common wheat plant, harvested at about a week to ten days old, when it looks like a miniature lawn. It became famous in the 1930s through the promoter Charles Schnabel, and later through →
Spirulina is one of the oldest foods on Earth, in a sense: the cyanobacteria that produce it are distant relatives of organisms that helped oxygenate the planet billions of years ago. As a human food, it has a real history →
Seaweed has been everyday food in coastal Asia for centuries — and a famine food and fertilizer in parts of Ireland, Scotland, and Brittany — yet many Western cooks know it only as the wrapper on sushi. That is a →
The stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) has a reputation problem: nearly everyone who has brushed against one remembers the tingle for hours. Yet this same plant has been eaten, brewed, and woven into fiber for thousands of years across Europe, Asia, →
In the dry regions of India, East Africa, and Southeast Asia, few trees earn their keep like moringa (Moringa oleifera). Sometimes called the drumstick tree for its long, slender seed pods, or the horseradish tree for the pungent flavor of →
Matcha is green tea, but not as most people know it. Instead of steeping leaves in water and discarding them, matcha drinkers consume the leaf itself, ground to a powder as fine as talc and whisked into hot water until →
Most people who know guava know the fruit — fragrant, sweet, and pink or white inside. Fewer know that the leaves of the guava tree (Psidium guajava) have their own long history. In Mexico, the Caribbean, West Africa, and parts →
Fenugreek is one of the oldest cultivated flavorings in the world. Its small, hard, golden-brown seeds and its clover-like leaves are essentials in Indian cooking, appear throughout Middle Eastern and Ethiopian kitchens, and give commercial “maple” flavoring its characteristic note →
