So it is another year of market cooking. Last year I did not do as good as I’d hoped I would in blogging about our meals. As a family however we did a pretty good job increasing our food consumption of market based meals. This year I am keeping the same challenge of eating from the market (as local as possible) however I am going to one up it and try to blog a bit longer than I did last year, meaning till the end of the market… December 2013.
From now until September I will be mainly focusing on items I can find at a local farmers market that Our Kitchen Table (http://oktjustice.org/) supports – The Southeast Farmer’s Market. In doing this I hope to support Our Kitchen Table in providing recipes for fresh, homemade meals that their participants can make at home. Meals based on the vegetables, fruits and products they can buy at the market and supplement with items they are growing in their own garden, or with ingredients found in their kitchens.
Recently OKT supplied their participants with seedlings to grow at home, some of which were mustard greens. So I will be honest, I have eaten mustard greens, but never cooked with them… a new challenge was taken on.
The other day while watering my own garden, some of which includes mustard greens, I thought I’d try a leaf raw and get a feel for what I was going to be cooking this week. STRONG flavor is just a minor way I’d describe mustard greens. It does have a mustardy flavor, just not one I enjoyed raw. To find a recipe around this leafy green that highlighted its flavor was my job tonight.
I went out and harvested my mustard greens, collard greens, bok choy and swiss chard. I put my mustard greens aside with the collards, stored the rest in the fridge and got to work going through my cook books. Needless to say my cookbooks did not give me any recipes I was looking for… so off to the internet my search went. I found a vegan site, http://blog.fatfreevegan.com/2009/07/balsamic-glazed-chickpeas-and-mustard.html, that had what I was looking for, but I didn’t have all it was asking for. Time to improvise…
I diced my red onion, removed the stems of my mustard greens and collard greens, I didn’t have that many collard greens so I combined them to reach the full 10ozs required for the recipe – consequences of a smaller garden. I got out my broth, this is a oil free recipe, and my improvised ingredients. I didn’t have garlic or red pepper, so I took out black pepper and some chili powder. I didn’t have balsamic vinegar, but I had apple – good enough for me. Soy sauce, nope… just left it out. I used honey instead of sugar and I had 16 oz of chick peas. Time to cook and make it happen with what I had.
1. chop onion, remove stems from greens and cut/tear into bite size pieces
2. in a 3qt pot (I used a dutch oven – you can even use a wok) place your onion in with broth and sauté until desired softness
diced red onions in 3qt dutch oven
3. I sprinkled on chili powder and pepper and continued sauteing a few minutes longer
4. I added in my greens and wilted them for about 3 minutes
added greens
wilted greens
5. I removed the greens and onions with a slotted spoon, leaving as much liquid as possible and placed in the chick peas, vinegar and honey and continued to heat
6. I cooked until the liquid was half of what it began at and then pour on top of the greens and served
final product
Everyone enjoyed the side dish, however they weren’t a fan of the chick peas flavor. Perhaps the soy sauce would have improved the taste or perhaps not. My husband suggested a different bean perhaps the cannellini or a butter bean might be better. My eldest enjoyed the dish and finished it.
If you have your own mustard green recipes please do share them in the comments below with links. Thanks
