Update on the greens and hash browns

I posted on the weekend about my food prep for hash browns and greens.   Yesterday I said I wasn't a big fan.  Today I decided I really like it with the kohlrabi "hash browns" rather than potato.  Here was lunch:

The kohlrabi cooks up nice with the onions and greens, no gooey stickiness like the potatoes.  I love potatoes, but not in this recipe.  This was really good, just with onions, kohlrabi, kale, collards.  I added some flavored vinegar for a little extra flavor.  I got some fancy vinegars a while back and this was champagne pear or something.  I think you can't go wrong with any high-quality fruit balsamic vinegar.      

Curry GOMB soup

Following on my GOMB soup theme (Greens, Onions, Mushrooms, and Beans), this week I made a curry version.  Last week I made a "spaghetti" version and the week before chili.  It's pretty much the same core ingredients, with different spices.

Ingredients:
1 lb dried beans or 2 cans
2 onions, chopped
1/2-1 lb mushrooms, chopped
3 large cloves garlic, chopped
1 red bell pepper (optional), chopped
few large stalks celery (optional), chopped
1-2 bunches collards or kale, chopped
1 can tomatoes
1 Tbsp curry
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp tumeric
1 tsp cinnamon
1-2 Tbsp date syrup

Note that the ingredient amounts are not important--you could halve or double each one and it will still taste good, if you like this sort of thing, that is.  Next time, I might double the spices.

Even though the picture is kind of dark, I like how colorful the soup is.  Here's what I did:  Soaked the dried beans over night, then cooked them up for 3 hours.  Add the can of tomatoes to the soup.   Heat a big fry pan up to hot, then throw on the onions which sizzle and brown.   They release enough liquid to keep from burning.  Add the celery, garlic, and spices, cook some more.  Add the red bell pepper, and mushrooms, cook until soft.  The mushrooms release lots of water which self-cleans the pan.  Add this to the beans.  Pressure cook or steam the greens and add them.  Add the date syrup.  

Final Garden Harvest

Today after my jog, I stopped off at the garden, looked it over, and decided the collards and kale really aren't growing anymore, so it's time to harvest what's left and pull the plants.  We had a couple of hard freezes the last few weeks, and that is supposed to sweeten them up.  It appears to be the case as confirmed by my nibbles during harvest.    Here's a picture of the collards after one frosty night last week:

Today I cut off all the rest of the leaves, de-stemmed them, stuffed them into freezer bags, and put them in the downstairs freezer.  Here's a picture of the freezer:  

This is collards, broccoli leaves, cauliflower leaves, and brussels sprouts leaves (they all look like collards); brussels sprouts are in the door (not shown).  This is pretty easy to do.  As I've mentioned in previous posts, it will be even easier to cook them up, because if you crinkle them with your hands, immediately after taking them out of the freezer, they crumble into small pieces--that is, no chopping!   How easy is that?

These are so economical!  If I use one bag a week in soup, I think I've got several months worth of greens in the freezer!  Dang, we only paid about $10 for all these plants and they give us greens for at least 6 months of the year.

The kale is good enough to eat raw on salads, so I don't usually freeze it.  I harvested two big bags of it and hope to be able to eat it over the next week.  I will be traveling with a  nutritarian friend so maybe we can share it.

Greens and Beans soup

I often make beans and greens soup but today I made greens and beans soup.  I want to not do any cooking during the work-week so all I have to do is prepare a salad every morning to split between lunch and dinner.  Then food prep takes only an hour and I'll have all my meals for the day.  It's repetitive but it doesn't bother me.  So I went to the garden and harvested a ton of greens: greens from the broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, collards and kale plants.  whew.  and some herbs.  and an eggplant.  and I combined those with all the veggies in the fridge that I normally cook, more eggplant, zucchini, mushrooms and onions.  and combined those with the beans and grains I was cooking.  Here's how I did it.

Last night I juiced 5 lbs of carrots and a bunch of celery added them to a pound of beans, 1/4 cup of purple barley, 1/4 cup of wild rice, and 1/4 cup of kamut (wheatberries), and soaked them overnight.  Here's the beans and grains before adding the juice (kind of pretty):

Cooked them up this morning for 3 hours.  Here they are cooked.  This was yummy.  I had to exercise discipline to not eat more than 2 bites of this:

I picked two lbs of greens from the garden, two lbs!

How am I going to cook up all these vegetables?  Use the food processor!   That shrinks them down.

Add some herbs from the garden:  basil, parsley, thyme, rosemary (chopped in the food processor)

Added 1 lb of eggplant, mushrooms, 1 green zucchini, 3 medium onions (like I said, whatever was in the fridge that could be cooked).

I cooked these up in two pressure cookers.  Two!   This was my crazy soup.

I dished them out into 20 1-cup servings.  20!   I ate two today, housemate ate one.  I figure I'll eat two a day, one for lunch and one for dinner.

I saved two for tomorrow, and froze the rest.  This will last me until I go on my vacation.  This is loaded, I mean loaded with greens.  And the odd thing is, it tastes quite good.  Even housemate liked it.  I was pleasantly surprised.

Here's the nutritional information for 2 servings:  327 calories, 17 g protein (17%), 2 g fat (4%), 65 g carbs (78%), 16 g fiber.

Channa Saag (sort of), and some blathering

This is an example of how using a recipe as a guide, but not following it exactly, makes life much easier.  And this turned out great.  I decided I eat so much raw food during the week, I want to start cooking more on the weekends.  But it's summer so I only want quick and easy things.  I gotta get outside and play!   If you a member of Dr. Fuhrman's website, you get a weekly recipe (or you can see them all at the recipe center).  So I went through a bunch of those emails and picked out about 15 recipes that looked good and easy for this time of year.  This morning I went grocery shopping and bought the kale, collards and spinach because they are local (around here, local tastes way better!).  I also made my weekly pot of beans--didn't even bother to add anything to them because I figure I can flavor them as I go.  So I did my usual thing of picking 2 packages of beans (1 lb each) from my rancho gordo stock--I usually go for a big one and a small one of different colors, or else just pick random.  Today's was a big white bean and a little orange one.  I soaked them last night, and cooked them up this morning--can't get any easier than that.  By the way, that cooked up into about 9 1.5 cup servings that I put in tupperware bowls and froze for the week.

Okay, so time to pick a recipe.  How about Channa Saag (Spicy Chickpeas with Spinach).  Now all the substitutions start because no way am I going to work hard at this, it's just lunch!  And since I made so many substitutions I can call it a new recipe and post it.

Ingredients for a 1 large serving or 2 small:
1/2 medium onion
1 garlic clove
1-2 medium tomatoes or 1/2 can
1 green chili or other pepper (I didn't use any, don't like them anymore)
1/2 tsp garam masala (the recipe called for tamarind powder but my co-op doesn't have it, and I didn't want to buy a big jar of concentrated tamarind for one lunch recipe, so I used garam masala and boy was that good!)
1/2-1 tsp curry
---(the recipe called for coriander powder which I don't really like so I didn't include it)
8 oz of spinach (wo that's a lot!  amazing how it cooks down though).
1.5 cups beans (recipe calls for chickpeas, who cares what kind of beans you use!)
cayenne pepper if you want (not me!)
herbs from the garden (not in the recipe, optional):  I threw in a lot of cilantro and chives, and a little dill and rosemary (because they were there).

Water saute the onion and garlic until tender.  Add the spices and herbs and peppers, cook for a few minutes.  Add the spinach, cook until it wilts, a few minutes.  Add in the beans, cook until heated.   Serve.

It was a great meal after a hard mountain bike ride.  Really yummy!

easy greens

This was "clean out my fridge" day. I didn't measure anything because I was using up whatever I had, but I list suggested amounts in case you want some guidance.

Ingredients:

a bunch of kale and any other greens you like to cook

1/2-1 onion, chopped

1/2-1 lb mushrooms, chopped (optional)

2-4 cloves garlic, chopped (to taste)

1/2-1 oz pecans or walnuts, chopped (optional)

1 Tbsp spicy pecan vinegar (or other flavored vinegar, or lime/lemon/orange juice)

Steam the greens, onion, garlic and mushroom for 10-20 minutes on stove, or 2-3 minutes in pressure cooker. Add the rest, toss and serve. Yummy.

brussels sprouts

Today I harvested a brussels sprouts plant.

I chopped the leaves in the food processor, cooked them for a bit and added them to tomorrow's micro-processor salad. Steamed the brussels sprouts and had them for dinner.