Collards | The Local Cook

Rutabaga and Greens Fritatta (Dark Days Challenge)

January 17, 2010 By The Local Cook 1 Comment

For this week’s Dark Days Challenge, I decided that I had better start using all the rutabagas that I’ve been amassing from my winter CSA. I started by looking through the recipes that Eater’s Guild had sent me.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should state that DH was highly skeptical. He hates rutabagas and turnips, or so he claims. So he did go out and buy very un-local, un-environmentally friendly salmon and made it in his smoker thing and made it while I made the frittata just in case he hated this recipe.

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Filed Under: recipe Tagged With: collards, dark days challenge, eggs, kale, Main Dishes, potatoes, rutabagas, winter

Dark Days Challenge: Honey Baked Chicken, Collards, and Apples & Squash

January 7, 2010 By The Local Cook 7 Comments

Can I just say, this was the most delicious meal I’ve had in awhile?

This Dark Days Challenge thing is harder than I thought it would be. Before I started this challenge, I thought I had the eating local thing down pat. What I didn’t realize was, how very hard it is to have every. single. ingredient local. So many times, the sides are mostly local, but the meat isn’t. Or the meat is, but the sides aren’t. Or I have a meal planned for Sunday night, and something comes up.

So I decided to make the meal during the week instead of trying to do it on the weekend. I made honey baked chicken from More With Less, Nana’s Collard Greens from myrecipes.com, and Baked Apples and Squash from Simply in Season.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: apples, Autumn, butternut, chicken, collards, kale, More with Less, Simply in Season

Dark Days Challenge: Fiery Chicken and Greens

December 20, 2009 By The Local Cook Leave a Comment

WARNING: This recipe not for the faint of heart or weak of colon.

I decided to combine two challenges today. My blogger friend FJ, whose blog is www.flawlessfitnessbook.com, asked me to create a meaty dish with some sort of high-water content vegetable, preferably spicy. His audience is a bunch of hard-core bodybuilders (although, I love his style of writing and find his advice just as helpful for a regular old person trying to lose weight and get more fit).

I knew right away I’d want to use sriracha sauce–if it’s heat he wants, it’s heat he’ll get! It’s not local, but it was the inspiration for the rest of the meal, which you’ll see uses local ingredients.

(Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/swnktstic/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

To cut the heat a little, I decided to mix the sauce with some local, raw honey. (Here’s a tip–if you have a local homebrew supply store near you, it can be a great source for inexpensive bulk honey as mead makers go through it like water).

I had some locally grown and processed chicken breasts that I had purchased at Byron Center Meats (not organic, unfortunately, but definitely not CAFO and from local small town farmers). So I sweet-talked DH into using the srirachi/honey mixture as a glaze and grilling the chicken on his new smoker/grill.

I also had a bunch of kale that I had chopped and sauteed and frozen from my summer CSA share. I thawed them and sauteed in a skillet with 1 T of sesame oil and 1 T of honey and 1 T of sriracha sauce until wilted. You could also substitute any green here (spinach, kale, swiss chard).

The verdict: When you first lift the chicken up to your mouth, the smell of the chili sauce warns you that this is going to be hot. But then when you take a bite, you taste the heat of the sriracha and then you taste the sweetness of the caramelized honey. You start to think hey, this isn’t so bad, and tastes awesome, but then you realize that your lips are on fire. So you take a bite of kale and it cuts the heat. Overall, it’s a tasty dish – but only try it if you can take the heat.

The recipe for FJ:

Spicy Sweet Chicken and Greens

Serves 4

6 tsp sriracha sauce (look for the red bottle with the rooster)

6 tsp honey (raw honey is best as it contains phytonutrients and enzymes and affects blood sugar less than other sugars or pasteurized/processed honey)

4 chicken breasts (8 ounces each)

1 bunch of greens (collards, kale, Swiss chard, or spinach)

1 T sesame oil (can also use olive oil)

Directions: Mix the sriracha sauce and honey, reserving about 1 T for the greens. Use the remaining mixture as a glaze for the chicken.

Chop the greens into bite-size pieces and saute in 1 T sesame oil. When wilted, add the remaining sriracha/honey mixture. Cook a few minutes to heat through, and until it’s the texture you want (I like mine steamed but not mushy; other people prefer more of a paste texture to their greens).

Nutrition info per serving:

Calories		247.7

Total Fat		5.6 g

	Saturated Fat	1.0 g

	Polyunsaturated Fat	2.1 g

	Monounsaturated Fat	1.7 g

Cholesterol		65.7 mg

Sodium		208.9 mg

Potassium		738.9 mg

Total Carbohydrate		20.9 g

	Dietary Fiber	3.9 g

	Sugars	12.3 g

Protein		29.9 g


Vitamin A	531.7 %

Vitamin B-12	7.2 %

Vitamin B-6	44.7 %

Vitamin C	135.6 %

Vitamin D	0.0 %

Vitamin E	9.7 %

Calcium	15.3 %

Copper	17.7 %

Folate	7.5 %

Iron	14.5 %

Magnesium	16.8 %

Manganese	42.0 %

Niacin	68.4 %

Pantothenic Acid	10.3 %

Phosphorus	27.7 %

Riboflavin	14.4 %

Selenium	31.4 %

Thiamin	12.2 %

Zinc	9.3 %

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: chicken, collards, kale, Main Dishes, Swiss Chard

Greens in Peanut Sauce

October 31, 2009 By The Local Cook Leave a Comment

From time to time, people tell me that they love the Simply in Season cookbook, but they don’t know what to make from it. Some of the recipes scare them, so they are glad that I’m doing this project so they can see how the dish turns out.

Greens in Peanut Sauce is one of those recipes that I tried almost as soon as I bought the book. I had just returned from kale Malawi and was used to the flavor combination. This has since become one of my favorite ways to make kale, and since I haven’t reviewed this recipe yet I have a good excuse to make it again!

In a large skillet, saute in 1 T of oil a chopped onion and 2-3 cloves of minced garlic. If you’d like, you can add a medium tomato and simmer for 2-4 minutes. I have done this with halved cherry tomatoes before and it’s a nice addition but not completely necessary.
Add 1/2 tsp ground coriander, 12 tsp cumin, 1/4 tsp salt, 1/8 tsp cloves, and cook and stir for 2 minutes.
Add 1 lb of kale or collards (8 C) and 1/2 C water, steam until greens are soft (but not mushy, there’s nothing worse than mushy greens). Stir occasionally.
Combine 2-3 T chunky peanut butter and 1-2 tsp hot water and add to the greens, stirring and cooking to coat evenly.

This can be used as a side dish or on its own (just add polenta or rice).

The verdict: Well, the bad news is that I realized halfway through that I don’t have any peanut butter in the house. The good news is that it tasted just fine without it. DH said he actually prefers it this way.

Filed Under: Uncategorized, recipe Tagged With: Autumn, collards, kale, Main Dishes, side dish, Simply in Season, vegetarian

Mixed Greens Saute'

October 23, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

greenssaute It’s funny how your tastes change over time. A few years ago I had no idea what to do with greens. Now, I look for opportunities to incorporate them into the menu. Tonight is a great example. We had leftover red lentil curry to use up, so I made some rice. But I felt the need for green. So I made this recipe from Simply in Season.

Boil 1/2 C of water and add 8 sun-dried tomatoes. Stir and let stand 30 minutes. Drain (you can save the water for soup or stew).
Saute’ 2 C of onion (sliced vertically), 1 sweet pepper (I used green because that’s what I had on hand), and 4 cloves of minced garlic in 1 T of oil in a large frypan and add the tomatoes.
Add 5 C of dark greens, torn, bring to a boil and simmer until the greens are tender (about 15 minutes). I used the beautiful purple curly kale that I got at the last CSA pickup.
Garnish with Parmesan if desired; serve over polenta, rice, couscous, etc.

The verdict: As I was sauteing the kale, I was suddenly worried that DH would be sick of yet another kale recipe. But he and I really liked this; the onion and peppers were equal players in the dish, and the sweetness of the sun-dried tomatoes was a nice change of pace.

Update on my progress: I’ve almost finished with the autumn kale recipes. Today I realized that I leave for Uganda and Zambia in 12 days! I’m trying to schedule as many recipes into the next week and a half as possible to make up for the time that I’ll be gone. I’m having the most difficulty with desserts, because we just don’t eat them that often.

I commented to DH tonight, “it’s a good dinner if I do say so myself.” To which he responded, “we’ve had a lot of good dinners.” I’m tackling recipes that I probably wouldn’t have before, just because of the multiple steps involved. Yet I’m still enjoying the process. That’s not to say I don’t have evenings where I declare that it’s time for Thai take-out. But for the most part I like being in the kitchen. Another bonus: our grocery bills have gone way down, and so have our eating out tabs. We’ve been able to put some extra money towards bills. Not a bad side benefit to this little project.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Autumn, collards, kale, side dish, Simply in Season

Savory Kale

October 2, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

As I mentioned before, this year I have a newfound appreciation for greens because of a “cooking with greens” class I took at my CSA. Knowledge is power! For this dish I used collard greens and a few winter radish tops since that’s what I had jumping out at me from the refrigerator. Which reminds me, I need to get in there and do some freezing of the vegetables that I haven’t cooked yet and are in danger of going bad. That’s what happens when I end up traveling or too many late nights at work. I have gotten much better at keeping up on stuff this year, though.

So for this recipe, I co savorykale oked a thinly sliced onion in a little olive oil until brown and crisp. When I first saw that I was like huh? I have never cooked onions long enough to become brown and crisp before, but it really works! I was really surprised they didn’t burn. So anyway then I removed them and set aside. Then I put a large bunch of collards/radish tops in the pan (chopped, of course) for a minute and then added some water, added the lid, and steamed for 10 minutes. It could have gone about 5 minutes longer. I normally don’t like mushy greens but I think it would have been OK for this particular recipe. Just a reminder, you can substitute any greens, as long as you adjust cooking time. Spinach cooks the shortest, then swiss chard, then kale and collards. Somewhere in there are the various beet greens, radish tops, kohlrabi tops, and carrot tops. Not a huge fan of the carrot tops but I feel bad throwing them away.

So after they’re soft, you are supposed to drain but mine didn’t need it. I added the onions back in along with a tablespoon of tomato paste, then cooked until it was heated through.

The verdict: Troy really liked it, but I wasn’t sold. They did set off the steak nicely but as I mentioned before they could have been cooked longer. I also think I would have preferred kale, but oh well. I will probably make this again as it doesn’t take the focus off the meat, which is what I was going for. So it’s a good side dish.

Filed Under: recipe Tagged With: Autumn, collards, Simply in Season, Swiss Chard