I love greens! Always have, even during my childhood.

As a kid at the supper table, when others might be reaching for seconds or thirds on fried chicken or mashed potatoes and gravy, I’d be dipping out a heaping refill of cooked greens.

Store-bought or wild-foraged, I loved ‘em one and although back then, grocers such as the old A&P market where we did much of our shopping, didn’t offer much in the way of fresh greens.

Spinach was the one and typically only choice. Usually, the available greens option was spinach in a can, possibly thanks to Popeye the Sailor Man cartoons and comics.

No matter. My parents were both of rugged Appalachian pioneer stock. Depending on such conveniences as grocery stores and commercially canned goods was not in their background.

Families who, quite literally, lived on the land and from the land. During their upbringing years, every bite of food they ate was raised, grown, hunted, or foraged.

When you wanted greens, you didn’t go to the market or open a can — you went out into the nearby fields or bottomlands and gathered a mess.

I thus learned to view spring’s arrival as a prime-time signal to break out the tote sacks and diggin’ sticks and hightail it to certain old fields and rural fencerows, fallow meadows, abandoned farm lanes, creek banks, and secret spring-holes.

Wild greens, fresh and tasty, awaited! All the incentive I needed because I loved these good eats now abundant and free for the foraging!

Gathering spring greens was a rite of the season, like going squirrel hunting in September, seeking morel mushrooms come May, or heading to our favorite crappie waters the moment redbuds blooms appeared.

But I’ve come to believe our outings and the subsequent bowls of cooked greens provided something beyond mere food for the table. Foraged greens were more than a side dish to a platter of fresh-caught fish fillets.

We’d gone afield. Walked the land. Witnessed firsthand how most places were still sparse and open, plants only just beginning to stir and heed earth’s vernal summons, barely reawakened from winter’s icy darkness.

On our table — often as the meal’s centerpiece, filling Mom’s biggest serving bowl — sat visible and edible proof of true resurrection. A gustatory gift confirming the new season we’d longed for and believed in during the previous months of cold somnolence.

Invariably, that first big bowl of fresh-foraged spring greens was apt to be a mess of tender, tasty dandelions.

Dandelion greens are, of all the greens, wild or tame, my hands-down favorite. I adore dandelion greens—with a passion bordering on obsession!

Dandelion greens are more nutritious than anything you can buy at the supermarket, including spinach. They have five times the vitamin A of broccoli. More beta-carotene than carrots. Are higher in protein and iron than comparable servings of leaf lettuce or endive. And are similarly rich in vitamins B-1, B-2, B-5, B-6, B-12, C, E, and D, plus deliver bio-available forms of biotin, inositol, potassium, phosphorus, magnesium, and zinc.

While dandelions may be the bane of your pristine green lawn aspirations, this fall from grace is a recent phenomenon. In earlier times the plant’s usefulness was revered—hence their botanical name, Taraxacum officinale, which translates as “the official remedy for disorders.”

Dandelions were used to treat everything from liver and gallbladder disease to bladder problems and troubles with the spleen, stomach, intestines, and pancreas, even urinary-tract infections and stones.

Nevertheless, I eat and relish dandelion greens, not because they’re good for me, but because they taste so scrumptious. And I rejoice with every one I harvest.

The best dandelion-gathering places are typically fallow fields and fencerows along neglected meadows — areas where the earth is rich and was once disturbed but has lately been allowed to revert back to some semblance of unruly wildness. There you will find dandelion plants of considerable size. It won’t take you long to fill a large tote sack or a couple of five-gallon buckets.

When gathering, cut the plants just below ground level. I pick early, pre-bloom plants.

Dandelions reduce considerably during cooking. It takes about half a grocery bag of their leaves to end up with enough to fill a medium size serving bowl. Unless your backyard is exceptionally large, or as gone to ruination as mine, chances are you’ll have to do additional foraging elsewhere.

Once you’ve gathered your mess of dandelions and got them home, pick out any remaining debris and lightly wash the greens.

You can add raw dandelion leaves to tossed salads. Or go fancy and sauté them with onions, garlic, and bits of pancetta ham in olive oil, with a finishing sprinkle of flake salt and an after-splash of Balsamic vinegar.

Personally, I stick with the simple, unadorned dish of my youth. Place leaves only in a cooker and fill halfway with water. Boil, covered, about twenty minutes.

Then place the partially-cooked greens into a skillet. Don’t drain before transferring, just ladle from pot to skillet using a fork, thereby retaining sufficient water (pot likker) to prevent scorching or sticking during frying. Add a tablespoon or so of bacon drippings for seasoning and fry an additional ten minutes.

The finished greens are served lightly salted with perhaps a dash of apple cider vinegar. One taste and you’ll nevermore look upon dandelions as pesky weeds.

For me, a mess of fresh-picked wild dandelion greens is both tonic and comfort food, the very essence of the new season. A mandatory — and delectable — taste of spring.

Reach Jim McGuire at: [email protected].