Huauzontle (Aztec Broccoli!)

Delicious edible leaves, but the best bits are the flowering shoots. They can get about 3 to 5 ft tall, and almost as wide. The leaves go red as nights cool, looking very pretty.

Easily picked, just take the top 3 inches of each flower stem (which will have both leaves and flowers) and cook like spinach or chard. They keep a great texture when cooked, with a very slight crunch to them. Not chewy – but they just don’t go completely soft the way that for example spinach does. So a great thing to mix in with rice, potato cakes, couscous or stir-fries, as an easy way to make a very simple and plain dish seem really special. 

Search on the internet for ‘Huauzontles’ for lots of Mexican recipes for fritters and more! But they’re great cooked simply and quickly like spinach. We plant around half a dozen plants in our home garden each summer, to supply us with shoots from mid-summer right through to the middle of October.

Botanically speaking, this is Chenopodium berlandieri. The baby plants look very similar to the weed Fat Hen – so don’t weed them out by mistake!