A love affair with leafy greens (ii)

In which there is actually a recipe.

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Warm greens* salad

*you can use kale, (swiss) chard, collard greens, beet greens, and/or spinach

Ingredients:

+ quinoa or rice or pearl barley or whole grain pasta or a baked or roasted potato or skip this ingredient altogether

+ cooking oil

+ garlic (a clove or two, pressed/crushed/minced)

+ onion (chopped/sliced/whatever– preferably red, but shallots or any cooking onion will do)

+ veggies: any appealing-to-you greens, or combination thereof [kale, beet greens, chard, collard greens, spinach], carrots, parsnips, beets, mushrooms, cauliflower, broccoli. I shred the greens by hand, shave the carrots and/or parsnips with a peeler for quick cooking, and I usually boil/roast the beets all at once when I first get them so I can add them at the end just to heat them up.

+ optionally: (if you feel fancy) goats cheese (without cheese, this is a vegan dish, by most definitions) &/or frozen or fresh raspberries or blueberries (a handful or two, squished), balsamic vinegar, and olive/sunflower/grapeseed oil for a vinaigrette (1 part vinaigrette to 3 parts oil)

Make:

1. rinse and scrub the quinoa in a fine sieve, put it in a pot with water (2 parts water to 1 part quinoa; add a stock cube if you desire) on high heat, bring it to a boil, reduce the heat and let simmer for about 15 minutes/until there’s no excess water. I find 1/4 to 1/3 cup of quinoa is a good single portion. (the veggies also works well with a baked potato, or on their own)

2. while you’re letting the quinoa go, heat up cooking oil in a pan on medium heat, and throw in the garlic, cook for 30 seconds to a min.

3. add the onion and cook for a few minutes

4. add other veggies before the onion gets translucent: carrots, parsnips, pre-cooked beets, whatever (I sometimes add a little water and cover the pan to cook the veggies faster)

5. cook your greens! you can (1) add your greens to the pan with a little water and cover up the pan to steam them for a minute or two, or (2) add your greens to the quinoa while there is still a bit of water in the pot, or (3) stem the greens in a colander over the pot with the cooking quinoa, or (4) pour a little boiling water over the greens in a strainer/colander to cook them instantly

6. mix all the veggies together with the quinoa and serve warm (with goats cheese and/or berry vinaigrette on top)

alternatively, you can roast any good roasting veggies (several whole garlic cloves, onion, carrot, parsnip, beets, cauliflower) tossed with oil, salt and pepper in a baking dish in the oven at 250˚ or so, adding mushrooms and greens towards the end, and mixing the quinoa in at the end. However, this might take a little longer (45 min to an hour)

a lot of beets in this version – eat them! they’re good for you.

A love affair with leafy greens (i)

In which I wax loquacious on attempts to eat local, be a vegetarian, and discovery of things leafy and green.

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It started in September 2010. Having flown across the ocean in an aeroplane to live a privileged student life at a posh old institution of higher learning in Britain and spend lots of time thinking about big problems like degrading ecosystems and unsustainable consumption and collapsing economies – and other things related to too much flying across oceans in aeroplanes and posh old institutions, I thought I’d try to compensate by otherwise being as low impact as possible. One way to do this was to make smart decisions about food, so I became a compulsive label-reader, and quickly realised that ‘low impact’ is really difficult to do: food is mass produced, grows in places it probably isn’t meant to grow (from, say, a climatic, soil chemistry, or pre-existing ecosystems perspective), it is sprayed, spliced, has strange things added to it, is over-packaged, and is flown/shipped/trucked in from thousands of miles away. Food lifecycles are so huge and complex that trying to achieve a perfectly environmentally and socially conscious diet is a decidedly Sisyphean endeavour. It seems you can never win.

So I decided I’d try to do two things in the spirit of a ‘low impact diet’:

(1) Eat as little meat as possible. 

This worked out to me becoming a capital ‘V’ vegetarian, with the notable exception of the occasional fish supper at the local chippy, because I was living in absurd proximity to the Best Fish & Chips in the World*. Outrageous hypocrisy aside, why eat as little meat as possible? It’s all about energy: you can get more energy from eating things lower down the food chain. The logic goes: why eat a cow, which has to be watered and fed grain and sustained for a number of years before I can eat it, when I could just skip all the effort/energy consumed in feeding and watering the cow and eat the grain myself? At the moment, I’m not really capable of providing a more elaborate answer than that, but I hope we can draw this out in future posts. Amy knows worlds more about biology & ecosystems than I and is thus substantially more qualified to talk about this type of thing. Also, she recommended a book to me: Diet for a Small Planet, which I acquired at a lovely bookstore in town (which sadly no longer exists), and expect will be very enlightening.

The other thing I tried to do was:

(2) Eat things that grow in the ground nearby at the time of year when they ought to grow there. 

This is kind of how I justified (*ahem* tried to resolve my own cognitive dissonance regarding) the fish & chips. The fish, you see, were coming in on little boats from the sea, which was literally right there. We’ve already seen that there is doubt about the idea that eating local is be-all-end-all of environmentally conscious diets <link to Amy’s post> and we’ve seen that, at least in Canada, food waste <link> has a much greater environmental impact than food miles. That said, eating local can have social benefits. For example, keeping your neighbours in business is probably good for your community. I also tried to eat seasonally, tried to eat things that could be grown in the climate in which I was living without too much extra energy input. That said, sometimes I just really wanted a glass of orange juice, and god knows oranges do not grow in Scotland. Not yet, at least.

So I went hunting in Tesco (not exactly a saintly food store, but it was in walking distance of my flat). That is when I found kale. Hey look! It grows in England, it’s £1 for a half kilogram bag, and it’s GREEN. That’s important, right? Eat your colours! and all that. Green = vitamin C and iron. Iron is a thing I am concerned about if I’m no longer enjoying the weekly Alberta beef of my upbringing. (I’m not going to lie: it’s good stuff, and my father is a barbequing professional.) But, yes, iron.

I tried kale and I tried cabbage and I after I went a bit overboard one time with brussel sprouts (which aren’t really a green, but look! 1 kg of Scottish brussel sprouts for 50p!!) I tried swiss chard. You can do LOTS of different things with greens. I’m slowly building my repertoire and I intend to share some of my “findings” and am excited to hear about other folks’ adventures in cooking/raw un-cooking with greens.

Greens 

Taste and versatility aside, cooking with greens can be a lovely aesthetic experience. Swiss chard, for example, is a really beautiful thing! It is lovely and leafy and green, and some varieties have the most beautiful rainbow-coloured stems: crimson red and vibrant yellow.

rainbow chard!

* The Best Fish & Chips in the World are in the East Neuk of Fife:

+ The Wee Chippy in Anstruther**

+ The Anstruther Fish Bar

+ The Tail End in St Andrews

** ‘EN-ster’ to locals

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See my next post for my favourite greens recipe.