These days, whenever I go hiking in Golden Gate Park or the Presidio of San Francisco, I'm always coming up on fields of these circular green leaves with tiny flowers in the middle. Called miner's lettuce, they are an edible salad green that can be eaten raw in salads, like nasturtiums, or boiled/sauteed like spinach.
Also known as winter purslane and Indian lettuce, miner's lettuce was a staple food for the gold miners during the Gold Rush because it is plentiful and contains large amounts of Vitamin C and helped to prevent scurvy. Miner's lettuce is a spring plant native to the mountains and coastal areas of Western North America, from Alaska to California. The circular leaf is mounted on a thin stem. Often there will be tiny white flowers in the center of the leaf. All parts of the plant are edible. It tastes somewhat like spinach when cooked.
As with any foraged food, you should be sure you aren't picking from an area that has been sprayed with chemicals or has sewage underneath the ground.
(Image: Kathryn Hill)
Magic One-Ingredient Ice Cream 5 Ways: Peanut Butter, Nutella, and More
Make Chocolate Magic Shell Ice Cream Topping with Only 2 Ingredients
Our reading list
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
Candy Stripe Teaspo...
30 DIY Projects for the 3-Day Weekend
Tina Wilson's Striking Style 
Comments (11)
I wanted to mount a purslane foraging expedition in the Presidio a month ago, but I worry that there might be secret government chemicals from back when, and/or that the park police will catch and fine me for picking plants from a national park.
yea, and dog pee
Can this be eaten raw? The lettuce, I mean, not the dog pee.
@splatgirl yes :) (the lettuce, not the dog pee. ha)
Again with the pee on the miner's lettuce!
Forager Langdon Cook who wrote Fat of the Land twittered the other day about seeing some dogs doing their business on some miner's lettuce and it reminded me of the time I first became intro'd to miner's lettuce.
When I was working at a resto in SF, a now-famous chef who was friends with the person I worked for stopped by with a big bag full of it that he had foraged in Sonoma Co. He asked me to give it my chef when he arrived.
When I gave the miner's lettuce to him, he looked at it and said, "that's the stuff that dogs pee on!"
Foraging will always be full of pee stories. I stopped Mike Gebert who produced the Sky Full of Bacon video on foraging, in which I appear, from eating some really nice purslane I found before we could wash it because I was pretty sure that dogs...you know--pee on it.
I'll always associate miner's lettuce w/ my time in SF which is quite fitting as the West Coast is where all miner's lettuce originated.
you can eat it raw, juice it, blend it!
When I lived in the Bay Area, I used to gather this on hikes and eat it with my picnic lunch!
When I was a kid growing up in the bay area, I'd forage for this in my yard, and eat it right then and there. I'd worry about how much bad stuff I accidentally ingested, but I turned out fine...so oh well!
Wow! I have been seeing this everywhere lately and didn't realize it was edible.
Ooh I used to pick these all the time when I lived in California! Added it to my salads.
It reseeds freely and likes acid soil, so if you see it in seed (the small white flowers turn into little papery husks with black seeds) just grab a handful and plant it wherever you can grow azaleas or other acid-loving plants. I dropped some under the dripline of my aggressively tannic black walnut tree and it's a happy camper and comes back every spring.
Please don't collect native plants from a National Park.