Category: Eat Your Greens

Part of the Eat Your Greens series. See all the delicious ways you can eat your greens!

We’re supposed to eat our greens. As the Popeye tune goes, “I’m strong to the finich cause I eats me spinach!” I think greens are fascinating. They are universal: people worldwide use and appreciate greens in the various forms they take. Those in North America may be familiar with spinach, lettuce, mustard greens, or collard greens. But there are SO many more.

Wherever they are used, greens are often a symbol of nutrition and health. To some, that implication of “health” is precisely what turns them off—we’ve all heard of the person who refuses to eat anything green. If only they knew all of the delicious ways to enjoy greens! Not only are these some of the most nutritious plants, they are abundant, versatile, and used in endless though familiar ways across cuisines, whether in salads, soup, condiments, and more.

What are Greens?

GREENS ARE: Green* leafy plants. Leaves from plants. That’s it. According to Wikipedia there are “nearly one thousand species of plants with edible leaves.” There is a clear distinction between raw greens and cooked greens. Raw greens are eaten in salads or as raw toppings for other dishes; cooked greens become fillings for pastries, ravioli, and so on; additions to stews or soups; or side dishes all on their own.

_{*I make exceptions for some greens that are technically not green, such as red lettuce, amaranth, radicchio, and so on.}

Greens appropriate for salads tend to be those that taste good raw, such as lettuce, spinach, baby greens, certain mustard greens, and fresh herbs like dill, parsley, and so on. But salads comprise a small portion of the many ways that greens are eaten worldwide.

There are many greens around the world suitable to different climates. Spinach is of course the quintessential green, which might be why so many greens have some variation of “spinach” in their English-language name: Examples include mountain spinach, strawberry spinach, Malabar spinach, Okinawa spinach, mustard spinach, water spinach, Ceylon spinach, Lagos spinach, tree spinach, New Zealand spinach, and hibiscus spinach.

Greens in the mustard family are a major category of greens. They are most commonly represented by collard greens or mustard greens, but it doesn’t stop there. The leaves of many popular mustard family vegetables are edible, such as cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, Savoy cabbage, kohlrabi, and gai lan or Chinese broccoli (ALL of which are the same species, Brassica oleracea). An interesting relative is Ethiopian kale, a recent addition to my garden. Asian cuisines use mustard family greens abundantly, including turnip leaves; napa or Chinese cabbage, bok choy or pac choi, tatsoi, mizuna, mibuna, and komatsuna to name some (all of which are the species Brassica rapa).

Bitter greens comprise another major greens category. They are most popular in Europe and particularly the Mediterranean, where people are familiar with all kinds of (often wild) greens. In Greece, “at least 80 different kinds of greens are used, depending on the area and season, including black mustard, dandelion, wild sorrel, chicory, fennel, chard, kale, mallow, black nightshade, lamb’s quarters, wild leeks, hoary mustard, charlock, smooth sow thistle and even the fresh leaves of the caper plant,” according to Wikipedia. In Italy and elsewhere, mixtures of boiled greens are used to stuff ravioli or added to frittatas and minestrone-style soups.

The diverse continent of Africa has a whole host of greens wholly unique to its wide-ranging environments, including the edible leaves of cowpea, pumpkin, sweet potato, okra, cocoyam, cassava, bitter tomato, and African eggplant as well as African cabbage, amaranth, roselle, bitterleaf, jute mallow, and others. Chopped and cooked leaves feature prominently in condiments and stews.

Clearly, “greens” are a worldwide phenomenon. Thus, it is no wonder that you can use greens interchangeably (as you can alliums, greens in their own right). However you define them, leafy greens are among the most nutritious things we can eat and are packed with nutrients. They are especially notable for their Vitamin K content, are high in protein (per calorie), fiber, vitamin C, vitamin B6, and manganese. In many cultures, green vegetables are prized for their nutritive content. Think of greens as the dressing, the color, the nutrients—the special guest to your meal.

Cooking Your Greens

Across cuisines, cooked greens make familiar appearances in lots of places, whether in soups, as sauces or pestos, or as fillings in tasty dumplings, pastries, pies, and so on. And it is often the case that you can substitute one for the other. You can make a green sauce or pesto that has practically any type of green you like.

Soups and Stews

Soups and stews are a classic way to eat greens and you can find many examples around the world whether its spinach lentil masala, peanut greens soup, or soups with greens and beans.

Green Soup

Ingredients: 1 lb diced potatoes A few young lovage stalks (or 1 stalk of celery to substitute) Handful of chopped chives 1 lb greens such as stinging nettle, spinach, sorrel, or others ½ cup chopped onions, shallots, garlic 1/3 cup cream or half & half 4 cups chicken or vegetable stock 2 tbsp butter Few sprigs of dried thyme Juice from one lemon Salt and pepper to taste

Directions: Blanch the nettles to get the sting out. Blanch in boiling salted water for a minute and strain; let cool. Saute onions, shallots, garlic for a few minutes. Add in the chopped potatoes, stock, thyme and simmer until potatoes are soft (5-10 minutes). Add in chopped nettles and chopped lovage (stems only) and simmer a few more minutes. Blend everything to a smooth consistency; add in the lemon juice, cream and chopped lovage and chive leaves. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Stir Fries and Braises

Stir fries and braises are especially good ways of preparing greens that have a bite, whether mustard-y greens or bitter greens. Examples include stir-fried Korean spinach, twice-cooked chard, Ethiopian greens, southern collard greens, sauteed Asian greens, and dandelion greens.

Batter Greens

Greens are also chopped and folded into various batters and starches. For example, greens are added to egg dishes like omelets and frittatas or to starches like corn (greens cornbread), potatoes (colcannon, spinach patties, onion pancakes), and rice (spinach rice) not to mention green pasta.

Fillings

Greens make a great filling for all manner of tasty, flaky, crispy, fatty pockets, whether they are dumplings, crusts (tarts, pies), or pockets (pasties). Perhaps it’s all just an excuse to eat delicious things in puff pastries with cheese. Anyhow, you might as well fill them with greens.

Examples include ravioli, dumplings such as pierogi, pastries, swiss chard tart, spinach pie, samosas…the list is endless.

Condiments, Sauces, and Pestos

The real greens lovers cannot be sufficed with hiding their greens in a soup, filling, or batter. They want to pour the greenness all over their food, and they will have nothing less than green sauce. Look no further than the endless variety of green condiments, sauces, and pestos. Examples include green purees such as spinach or lamb’s quarters, spinach sabzi, green sauce, and various pestos like the tasty kale pesto or scallion pesto. Many greens can be made into a “pesto” aka blended green, nut, cheese, and oil. Marc Williams demonstrates this well with his pesto video: At its most basic level, pesto requires garlic (or other pungent alliums like wild onions or shallots), greens, nuts (think pine nuts, pumpkin seeds, walnuts), olive oil, and cheese.

Lemon Sorrel Cream Sauce

Ingredients: 2 cups chopped sorrel leaves (or spinach, chard, or other greens) 1 cup cream or half & half 1 cup chicken or vegetable stock 2 tbsp butter Juice from 1 lemon Salt and pepper to taste

Directions: Simmer cream and stock on low heat until reduced by half. Melt the butter and sauté chopped sorrel until wilted. Puree in food processor with cream-stock mixture. Add lemon juice, salt, and pepper. Add to pasta, rice, mashed potatoes, or other starchy foods.

Have I convinced you of the Power of Greens? Let me know in the comments or shoot me an email!

Part of the Eat Your Greens series. See all the delicious ways you can eat your greens!

alliaceous

: resembling garlic or onion especially in smell or taste

For Wisconsin gardeners, spring is a tumultuous time of year full of excitement and dashed hopes. It’s also a time when little is growing, making the things that are growing take supernatural significance. In that sense, nothing proves their worth more than alliums.

Alliums are a group of plants you need to know. They include familiar favorites such as garlic, leeks, chives, onions, shallots, and scallions as well as less familiars such as walking onions, ramps, wild onions, and more. Most of them form bulbs that reproduce yearly, making them easy-to-grow perennials, and most have edible leaves and bulbs.

Alliums are interesting on several levels (see Garlic, Onions, and Other Alliums). Not only are they among the first things to eat in spring, but they are packed with beneficial nutrients when we need them most after a long, dark winter. Although my background in science generally prevents me from taking most “home remedies” at anything but face value, I swear by eating a few cloves of raw garlic when I feel a cold coming on. Garlic and Other Alliums is a fascinating book about all things allium including research on promising medicinal and dietary uses for this group of plants. In addition to cruciferous vegetables, alliums are likely to be the most effective of all the raw vegetables at cancer prevention (Eating on the Wild Side). What works for people works for plants as well: Allium oils and extracts are purportedly effective as natural pesticides, and planting alliums with other vegetables can repel pests.

I tend to think of alliums interchangeably, to some extent. Not only are there many similarities that make them easy to substitute for one another, they can actually be difficult to distinguish. This is because the boundaries between the species are often unclear even to scientists—who identify anywhere from 200-1,000 allium species. In any case, often some oniony-looking thing comes up in my garden and, though I’m not sure what it is exactly, I know I can use it in something that needs a kick.

That garlicky kick we love comes from the sulfurous chemical compounds which give alliums their alliaceous aroma and bite. The flavor varies according to the sulfate content of the soil they grow in; in the absence of ground sulfur, they lose their bite entirely.

How to Cook with Alliums

The bite of alliums makes them a natural seasoning for both raw and cooked dishes. They pair well with starches like pasta, bread, and potatoes and effectively cut through the fat of meat dishes. In my view, there’s nothing better than loading handfuls of chopped chives on some mashed potatoes or pasta; frying up onions, leeks, or shallots as a base for literally anything (or even eating them just on their own); or liberally sprinkling a dish with allium salt (see recipe below).

Allium leaves lend themselves best to raw or lightly cooked dishes—chives, scallions, and garlic or onion leaves can all be used interchangeably here. The bulbs—such as onion, garlic, and leek—can be cooked as part of stir fries, as the base of soups, or cooked in fat and eaten on their own.

Here are some other ideas for alliums:

• Pesto. I love the chive pesto recipe, which works well with any starch
• Chive or shallot vinaigrette
• Young or green garlic (before it has formed the bulb) can be used where you would use garlic such as in soup or pesto (see lovage green garlic pesto)
• Frittatas; for these, I draw inspiration from Persian cuisine, which features herbs prominently in spring (see Persian frittata with walnuts or Persian frittata with potato and pomegranate)

Interestingly, the sulfurous compounds that give alliums their bite behave in different ways. Chopping garlic intensifies the pungency, but chopped onions quickly lose their pungency. Moral of the story: Chop garlic first and let it sit for 5-10 minutes but use chopped onion (and leeks) immediately. If you are only using part of an onion, consider sautéing the remainder in oil or butter to better preserve its flavor rather than sticking the remaining bit of raw onion in the refrigerator.

Finally, preserve the seasoning yearlong with a dried allium salt!

Allium Salt Recipe

Ingredients: 2 cups chopped allium leaves (e.g., garlic, chives, ramps) 1 cup coarse kosher salt 1 cup sea salt Zest from 4-5 lemons

Directions: Combine the chopped allium leaves with the salt and lemon zest on a baking pan. Place in the oven on the lowest heat setting (mine is 175) for about an hour, checking every 20 mins to stir the salt around. Once the leaves are dried or almost dry you can turn off the heat and leave in the oven overnight to cool. Pulse everything in a food processor to a fine texture (or leave clumpy if you prefer). Yields about 3 cups of salt.

Allium Relationships

For those who want to know more, here’s a quick breakdown of different allium species. Their relationships may surprise you; for example, elephant garlic—the big garlic often found at grocery stores—is more closely related to leek than to true garlic!

Common varieties

Leek, elephant garlic, pearl onion, kurrat or Egyptian leek (A. ampeloprasum)

Onion, shallot, scallion or green onions (A. cepa)

Garlic (A. sativum)

Chives (A. schoenoprasum)

Less common varieties

A. chinense (Chinese onion or rakkyo)

A. fistulosum (Welsh or Japanese bunching onion)

A. tuberosum (Chinese or garlic chives)

A. stipitatum (Persian shallot)

A x proliferum (tree or walking onion)

Tree or walking onions are among the easiest alliums to grow and can spread rapidly given the unique way they grow. They multiply via little bulbs or “offsets” that weigh down the stalk, drooping its leaves to touch the ground where the bulbils “walk” and grow into a new plant. These cute little bulbils can be eaten fresh or pickled.

Wild varieties

Ramps (A. tricoccum)

Wild onions of various species (for example, A. acuminatum, A. anceps, A. angulosum, A. canadense, A. cernuum, A. ramosum)

Ramps are among the easiest edible things to forage in the wild. They are quite strong and best used in small quantities, say in ramp salt or buttermilk ramp biscuits.

Indigenous people throughout North America have used different species of wild onions available in their location in ways that echo many of the uses described above, most commonly as a seasoning or spice to flavor foods. For example:

• Raw leaves and flowers used as a garnish for salads, soups, and potatoes
• Chopped and/or dried bulbs used to season dishes, soup, sauces
• Leaves cooked into a relish or condiment
• Cooked bulbs (often roasted in pits) pressed into cakes or cooked in fat
• Bulbs pickled
• Bulbs and leaves preserved in salt
• Bulbs and leaves stir fried with meats and other vegetables

It may not seem like much of a plant, but sorrel deserves a chance in any garden. This easy to grow perennial herb requires little maintenance and produces tasty leaves useful in cooking. You may be surprised to learn about the varied uses of this plant and its interesting relatives.

Quick Facts

Sorrel is a member of the Buckwheat (Polygonaceae) family, a relative of rhubarb in the Rumex genus, which consists of the docks and sorrels. You are perhaps familiar with Curly dock (Rumex crispus), a common roadside “weed” deadly to animals but edible by humans, who traditionally ground its seeds into flour, roasted seeds into a coffee-like drink, or used the leaves as a nutrition-packed spring herb much like other sorrels.

Sorrel is easy to grow and propagate; its basal growth form is easily divided at the roots. It has no major insect or disease problems and can even be grown in containers. The leaves produce all season long, though it prefers shade. Cutting back in spring or when the flower stalk emerges stimulates growth, as does clipping the leaves regularly throughout the growing season. Many cultivated varieties are available.

Sorrel has the unusual trait of being dioecious, which means that male and female flowers grow on different plants. This trait is rare in flowering plants, only 10% of which are dioecious. The rest produce male and female flowers on the same plants.

Uses for Sorrel

Sorrel is among the many wild green herbs long harvested for food and medicine throughout history. The sour, lemony-tasting and nutritious leaves are used in cuisine applications spanning Europe and parts of Asia and Africa, often in combination with other greens. The acidic flavor comes from the presence of oxalic acid, which is toxic at high doses. This same high oxalic acid content is what makes rhubarb leaves toxic. Cooking or blanching sorrel leaves reduces the oxalic acid considerably. Mature leaves are best cooked, and young raw leaves are OK (in moderation) in salads or sandwiches.

Lemon Sorrel Cream Sauce

Ingredients: 2 cups chopped sorrel leaves (or spinach, chard, or other greens) 1 cup cream or half & half 1 cup chicken or vegetable stock 2 tbsp butter Juice from 1 lemon Salt and pepper to taste

Directions: Simmer cream and stock on low heat until reduced by half. Melt the butter and sauté chopped sorrel until wilted. Puree in food processor with cream-stock mixture. Add lemon juice, salt, and pepper. Add to pasta, rice, mashed potatoes, or other starchy foods.

Sorrel has many applications: Herbal preparations, dyes, salads, soups (particularly sour soups), sauces, pastries, stuffed grain rolls akin to stuffed grape leaves. The leaves quickly lose freshness and should be used soon after harvesting – yet another reason to grow it in your garden, because you won’t find it at the grocery store. The roots have been used in folk medicine preparations; for example, “Drinking sorrel water flavored with a bit of honey was believed to bring down a fever and help clear sinus infections (Bello et al. 2019)” (Korpelainen & Pietiläinen, 2020, p. 240). Research studies have identified compounds within sorrel and related species with antioxidant and other biologically significant properties.

Sorrel Relatives

Other close relatives of common sorrel are worth mentioning:

Sheep sorrel (Rumex acetosella) usually considered a weed but the small leaves are edible

Red-veined sorrel (Rumex sanguineus) considered more of an ornamental because the leaves are not considered tasty

Spinach dock or patience dock (Rumex patientia) has a good flavor similar to spinach

Spinach rhubarb (Rumex abyssinicus) leaves can substitute for spinach and ribs can be used like rhubarb; native to tropical Africa where it is used for medicines, as a wild potherb, and for dye

French sorrel (Rumex scutatus) used as a spinach substitute and in salads and soups; preferred by some over common sorrel

References

Korpelainen, H., & Pietiläinen, M. (2020). Sorrel (Rumex acetosa L.): Not only a weed but a promising vegetable and medicinal plant. The Botanical Review, 86, 234-246.