Eat Your Greens!
Plus, grants for farmers of marginalized groups, and the weekend market schedule
It’s Easy to Eat More Greens
Greens are great as a means of integrating more healthy, locally produced foods into your diet in a way that is easy on your food dollars. Greens such as kale or Swiss chard often come in big budget-saving bunches. Buy root vegetables with their greens attached and you are effectively getting two vegetables for the price of one. And thanks to the increasing numbers of farmers practicing season extension with hoophouses, there is no “growing season” for greens anymore — they are widely available year round.
Let’s start a little greens tour with kale, one of the most familiar plants in this category. I know, I’m taking a bit of a risk here, because there are people who just loathe kale, either because it has a bit of a bitter taste (not overwhelming, though) and requires a bit of hand labor to remove the leaves from the much less appetizing stems.
Our standard prep for kale is a Kale Salad with Cheddar and Apples that I found on the New York Times Cooking site. Here’s a link to the recipe.
The photo above is my prep for the salad. From left, 4-year-old local cheddar, chopped walnuts (the recipe calls for almonds, but remember that recipes are guidelines, not rules), a chopped Gala apple and grated fresh parmesan, and for the dressing, fresh lemon juice, finely chopped garlic, and olive oil.
Here is the finished recipe. If you like kale, I think you’ll definitely like this. If you’re a skeptic, this is a good test of whether your mind can be changed.
Next up is a good example of the extra food mileage you get by buying root vegetables with the greens attached. On the left are carrot greens; on the right, Korean turnip greens. In the middle is something completely different that I picked up from one of my favorite specialty growers: shungiku, edible Japanese chrysanthemum leaves.
At least 90 percent of the work on this preparation is in stripping the leaves from the stems. To cook, I started by sautéing chopped garlic and red spring onion in olive oil…
Then I added the greens, starting with the carrot greens, then the turnip greens and finishing with the chrysanthemum leaves. This took only a few minutes until the greens were cooked through and softened.
This final prep will take a lot of people into uncharted territory. My friend Tracey Vowell from Three Sisters Garden in Kankakee, Illinois, has a longtime following for her sweet corn and watermelons that in most years grow to enormous size. But she also has a mastery of unusual greens and herbs available, like her other crops, for home delivery in the Chicago area.
The leaves in the big bowl are lamb’s quarters, a plant widely regarded as a weed that nonetheless is very tasty and nutritious. This description is from an article on the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s website:
Lambsquarters (Chenopodium album), a common roadside and field plant, is easy on the eyes and useful to boot. A member of the expansive amaranth family, which also includes beets, chard, quinoa, and spinach, lambsquarters can be identified by the telltale dusty white coating on new growth and the undersides of leaves. It’s a favorite among foragers, who mostly gather it for the leaves, which taste like a mild version of spinach… The leaves are exceptionally high in vitamins A and C, as well as in calcium, iron, and protein. It ticks all the boxes!
In the small bowl at the top is glasswort, which I admit that I may have never heard of until it appeared on Tracey’s e-commerce site. The really curious thing about this plant is it generally grows in salt marshes, but Tracey has made it work in the black soils of eastern Illinois. Like most greens, glasswort has high nutrition value; according to WebMD, “It has a high protein content and is rich in linoleic, oleic, palmitic, and stearic acids.”
The other bowl contains leaves of a much more familiar plant: Italian parsley.
The prep technique is virtually identical to the one above. Sauté onion and garlic in olive oil, then add the greens one by one and cook til done.
If you have greens recipes of your own that you like, I’d love to share them. Send to bob@localfoodforum.com.
Marginalized Farmers: Apply for Grants by 7/15
Applications are open until July 15 for American Farmland Trust’s Brighter Future Fund Grants of up to $10,000 for farmers who are part of historically marginalized population groups.
According to the Trust,
AFT seeks to support farmers across America through the Brighter Future Fund. We also recognize that social and racial injustices are entrenched in the history of our nation and our agricultural system. Our past informs inequities that persist today, and marginalized agricultural producers have been denied equal opportunity to prosper, facing challenges such as loan discrimination, barriers to accessing federal and private programs, exploitative labor practices, intimidation, and theft and appropriation of land.
In recognition of the need for greater equity and inclusion for all groups who have been, and still are, marginalized, we aim to support these producers through the Brighter Future Fund. We focus on providing resources to beginning, women and veteran farmers, as well as those historically resilient farmers identifying as socially disadvantaged in alignment with the USDA.
Funding will be allocated to help farmers 1) Improve farm viability; 2) Access, transfer, or permanently protect farmland; or 3) Adopt regenerative agricultural practices.
Click the button below to learn more about the program and apply by July 15 if you are eligible.
This Weekend’s Farmers Market Schedule
I’m sharing this weekend’s market schedule with fervent hopes for much better weather than last weekend. Let’s get out there and support our local farmers!
Oh, yeah. I use a Bittman recipe. It will give me a chance to tell the story about how attending a Bittman lecture when I had one food out of DC influenced me to do what I'm doing.
Keep the recipes a-coming!! (Baba recipe, hint hint...)