Baby greens steps

It’s the last week of the mid-season CSA, and the box is absolutely stuffed. Seems the greening of my own garden and the blooming of the rhodies has its counterpart on the farm in leafy greens. Yes, there are oodles of lettuce, which is a good thing, because I love salads, and become testy at the mere thought of wimpy winter lettuce. But I’m talking about greens, the leafy greens that all those annoying studies talk about.

I remember asking about greens once as a teenager, and my mother replied simply, “we don’t have to eat greens,” as if voting for McCarthy provided ample protection from the Western diseases. I shrugged it off, and was thankful for spinach, which remains one of my favorites: creamed, steamed and just plain raw.

But at some point along the journey—and it has been over decade of little tweaks here and there—I realized wanted to bring greens, the heavy-duty stiff bundles you don’t see anywhere but farmers markets or the co-op, onto our plates.

My first attempts were dismal. I bought some kale at the co-op, brought it home, and steamed it to death. Darling Husband, usually game for new things, just pushed it around his plate, and Number One just gaped at it in disbelief. When faced with another bunch a couple of years later in a gift CSA box, I put off preparing it long enough that it ended up on the compost heap. This did not bode well.

Then one day, back when I still used to put up my feet and read a magazine, I delved into the February 2002 issue of Bon Appétit, and found a recipe for tortellini-kielbasa soup. You should know that I do not consider recipes or patterns to be gospel of any sort. This is usually only a problem when knitting socks, and on rare occasions in the kitchen. But this sounded like the base of an attractive and hearty soup: sausage, tortellini, kale and white beans in a vegetable broth, and sprinkled with some Parmesan cheese at the table. No worries, I thought, I have all the ingredients except Kielbasa (but I have another sausage that would work), fennel (just skip it), and kale (I’ll just substitute the old zucchini in the fridge).

I made a pot, and the family loved it. Number One always loves noodles and beans, and gladly ate the sausage; a toddler Little One gleefully picked out a tortellini with his fingers and giggled when he saw how the cannelli bean nestled in the belly button. But once they realized there was zucchini in there, the honeymoon was over.

But the soup was too good to abandon: on the next trip to the co-op, I picked up a bunch of kale—“dinosaur kale”—and brought it home. I made the soup again, only daring to use half the bunch. The kids loved it; perhaps the zucchini had put it all in perspective. Whatever: they were hooked. When a good friend had her darling baby girl, I made up another pot to use up the rest of the bunch and brought it to her family. A call the next day informed me that the soup was “slammin’!” and so it shall be called for eternity.

Once the floodgates opened, I learned that you can roast kale into tasty chips, and that if you cook it quickly (and deglaze with balsamic vinegar), it is sweet like candy. Once I got over the kale hump, I could even branch out into chard and pok choi. I tasted real fried greens in Louisiana and fell in love. No, we don’t have to eat greens; we get to.