We have several basic recipes for all the cooking greens. Each green gives a slightly different result, so you can get lots of dishes with just a few recipes and ingredients. I divide the greens into two categories: soft and springy. Chard, spinach, and arugula melt down into a soft mass. Beet greens, kale, collards, and most braising greens have more body and maintain more chewiness, spring, whatever. Many recipes work well across the whole spectrum, but you may have a textural preference, matching one group with one recipe, the other group with another recipe.
Our favorite, especially for chard, is to heat olive oil, toss in a couple garlic cloves and a handful of golden raisins. When the raisins are plumped, chop up the stems and toss them in. Give them a minute or two while you stack the leaves and slice them into strips (called chiffonade). Toss the greens in. Cook them just enough for them to change color, to get slightly translucent. I don’t like to cook them to mush. In my book any green-colored green that is cooked to olive color is way overcooked. Take out and put in a dish, and top with toasted sunflower seeds. Craisins and walnuts are another good combo.
Second most popular is to cook garlic in olive oil. Chop up the stems and cook a minute or two. Toss in the chiffonaded greens and cook just until they collapse or change to bright color. Take out and sprinkle with balsamic vinegar. Various oils and vinegars make this simple preparation very versatile.
“Speedopakita” is written for spinach, but works equally well with chard or arugula.
Especially good with kale and collards because of their “body”: saute with hot sesame oil and roasted sunflower and raisins.
For spinach, I still go for what I grew up with: steam it until it collapses. Drain, dump it out in a bowl, sprinkle with apple cider vinegar. Eat.
There is seasonality to the greens. Spinach is wonderful in cold weather. It is sweet, and it survives cold weather that few other greens will. When days get 14 hours or longer and warm though, it quickly tries to go to seed and gets bitter. Other greens are at their best in the fall after some frosts, and OK in the cool spring – arugula, kale. Lettuce is great in the spring and fall, but doesn’t grow through the depths of winter and is a challenge to keep sweet in the heat of summer. Swiss chard is great spring through fall. Many Asian greens that we use for our salad mix are both cold and heat hardy so we grow year round. Their challenge is little beetles that like to chew holes in the leaves in the spring and summer. So, we will try to have spinach in the spring, but expect Swiss chard for the summer.
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