Kales and cooking greens

I will do my best to hold back here but I can't promise much restraint as my love affair with bitter cooking greens goes way back to my Texas childhood. In my birth state a love of greens like collards, mustards and turnips is deep and religious in its fervor. They were on the table more than one night a week, tender, flavorful and lovingly prepared. Usually with a lot of fat, porcine in origin. Texans are not fearful of the ham hock. Luckily and later in life I found my way to cooler climes in the foothills of Virginia where delicious greens like Winterbor and Curly Kale flourish. I wasn't familiar with them but I thought I couldn't go wrong with a cooking method I'd learned from the adorable mother of an old boyfriend. She was also from Texas and knew good greens without them having to slap her in the face. However, she was also a practitioner of holistic medicine and a yogi who had long ago sworn off animal products and unhealthy fats. She showed my the way and I have not looked back. This is my favorite method for cooking hearty greens of any kind. Wish I could take credit for it.  Wash and chop everything into a very large bite size and fill a large cooking vessel with just enough water to cover the greens about two thirds of the way. Salt and pepper the cooking water  generously, you want the cooking liquid to be flavorful as the salt helps to leach and mellow any bitterness. Add is a good shake of crushed red pepper, a glug of olive oil and five or six garlic cloves peeled and smashed with the side of a knife. Cook on a high simmer for about ten minutes and then turn the fire down to medium low and continue cooking for another ten to fifteen minutes until the greens are tender but not mushy. Pour in a good slug of cider vinegar and serve. Preferably with cornbread and a mess of blackeyed peas. But if you happen to hail from Texas then you were going to do that anyways.

Garlic Scapes

Ahhh... garlic scapes. These snakey green tendrils are a true seasonal delicacy and very flavorful. You can use them exactly as you would garlic in sauces or sautes while you wait patiently for your first taste of green garlic. I love to make a vinaigrette with finely minced garlic scapes using just a bit of oil (I like the richness of walnut oil) and white wine vinegar, a big dab of dijon mustard, salt, cracked pepper and sugar to taste. Whisk everything together and pour over warm boiled potatoes and serve over a bed of fresh greens. The potatoes just drink up the vinaigrette and I cannot think of a more elegant treatment of potato salad. As a bonus any leftover vinaigrette is a lovely marinade for fish, tofu or chicken.

Flats of new parsley

What can't you do with parsley? For me this humble little herb is so much more than a garnish. It is a Vegetable with a capital V. And while these little babies in the greenhouse are lovely there is nothing I like better than to harvest from a tall, verdant stand of flat leaf parsley by mid summer. Parsley is believed to be a cleansing herb, purifying to the blood and liver. I'll believe it. A bite of something loaded with the cool, mildly bitter leaves can cure me of almost anything. It finds a way onto our dinner plates nearly every night. One of my favorite simple suppers from pregnancy is still a plate of hot orzo tossed with a big handful of chopped parsley and a few cups of raw spinach. The heat from the pasta just barely cooked the greens and I tossed in a bit of butter and shaved parmesan. Not really a recipe but it was so fresh and satisfying I'm sure the non-pregnant can appreciate it as well.

Photos this week

photos this week

Around the Springtime Garden

Writing about the Springtime garden and kitchen shouldn’t be all that hard. There is an abundance of inspiring material close at hand …

Watching an old hand like Cabel and fresh new garden faces hustle like busy bees in and out of the green house hauling wooden flats of tender plants into the cool air

Gathering a fragrant armful of cilantro and spinach for a batch of raw garbanzo falafel…ohhh, you want this in your supper table

The simple pleasure of being in the company of Catherine’s ranunculus

Kiddo (and adult) fascination with the new worm bin

Faithful Jim, soaking up the warm sun, silhouetted in apple blossoms going about the task of delivering the compost.

The wonders never cease during a regular walk on a regular Innisfree morning. I hope that you may find some time in your week to make a quick stop by this new Vegucation blog and find or share some inspiration of your own. There will be recipes each week celebrating the flavors of the seasonal produce and herbs you find in your box on delivery day. Isn’t delivery day the best day of the week? We should all take a small moment to celebrate the food we are so lucky to eat and the wise, gentle hands that help to grow it. May this space be a place for it.

Cilantro Scented Raw Garbanzo Bean and Spinach Falafel

This recipe is no slouch and kind of blew my mind when I saw my friend Ruth making it in my kitchen. When she uncovered this big bowl of coarsely chopped and obviously uncooked chickpeas what I though was, there is no way she read that recipe correctly. Sometimes it is such a joy to be wrong. As luck would have it I have been on the hunt for a truly wonderful, healthy falafel recipe for a while, because in my hands falafel tends to go one way or another. Pasty and starchy tasting or greasy. Yuck. My family’s days of substandard falafel are over.  This recipe captures that good grainy, earthy quality that is so particular to chickpeas, finds a good home for a few extra handfuls of greens and does all that while being effortlessly vegan and gluten-free.  Serve these yummy little patties over rice or a crisp green salad or some orzo tossed with fresh dill, garlic, a good squeeze of lemon juice and a healthy slug of olive oil. Or just dip them in yogurt alongside carrot sticks and pita bread. Thank you to Ruth and her Israeli relatives for the inspiration.

Ingredients

3 cups of dried garbanzo beans picked over and soaked overnight in plenty of cold salted water.

4 cups of clean, loosely packed spinach

Fresh cilantro (I used a good handful of stems and leaves)

3 cloves of garlic

1 big, heaped tablespoon of tahini (or any other kind of nut butter you like)

the juice of 1 big lemon

salt and pepper to taste

Drain the garbanzo beans and set aside.

Buzz all of the spinach cilantro and garlic in a food processor or blender until everything is combined into a vibrantly emerald pulp, chunky is not a problem.

Add the garbanzos, tahini and lemon juice to the garlicky spinach and cilantro in two batches and pulse lightly until the beans are just fully combined with the veggies.

Add salt and pepper to taste.

Form them into patties and fry them in a tablespoon or so of olive oil over generous heat for about three or four minutes per side or until crisply golden and deeply fragrant.

Done.

Now you can eat your raw, vegan, gluten-free chickpea patties for supper.  

A new year of green, growing things. A new place to share news from the garden, recipes, jokes, stories and learn what's what in that beautifully, brimming CSA box.