Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Eat Your Greens!

Gardening in Montana is challenging, but so far this year we are doing quite well.  Lots of yummy greens out there. It's quite satisfying to prepare a meal with veggies grown in your own backyard. Last night we had mustard greens with our dinner and they were absolutely delightful.  I thought I'd share with you the way I prepared them.

Here are the little sprouts, trying hard to survive snow, below freezing temps and hailstorms.
Thankfully, they persevered.

After bringing in the freshly picked greens, I soaked them in a big bowl of water several times.  Just swish them around, drain the bowl and repeat.  Once that was done, I rinsed each leaf and put them in the colander to drain.  Trust me, unless you like your greens gritty, you'll want to rinse them well. 

Being a Texan and all, I decided to cook up some bacon to go in the greens. Applegate Farms has really good nitrate-free bacon and is by far the best bacon we can get at the store.   Anyhoo...I chopped the bacon along with some onions and fried it up in my favorite skillet.




While the bacon and onions were cooking, I chopped up the washed greens.  Once the bacon/onion was browned I added the chopped greens, a few at a time.  Greens pretty much cook down to nothing, so I had that colander stuffed with as many as I could fit.  I let them wilt a bit in the skillet before adding the next handful, until all of the greens would fit in the skillet.



Once the greens had wilted, I added a couple of teaspoons of apple cider vinegar and salt to taste and let it simmer for a couple of minutes.


Next came chicken broth.  I think I ended up putting in around 2 cups. I let that simmer for 15-20 minutes, basically until the greens were tender and good.


After simmering and cooking out most of the liquid, the greens just needed a little more salt and a bit of pepper.  You can do that to taste.  Here is a pic of the finished greens...


Honestly, these were sooooooo tasty and good!  I hope you give them a try.