eating more greens

With apologies to Kermit, but, it's not always easy being green. Eating green, that is; leafy green stuff. Last week I declared my kitchen a leafy-green-free-zone, and (almost) happily ignored the forest of silverbeet and kale threatening to take over my garden, kitchen and insides. I ate cauliflower, sweet potato, carrot, beetroot, normal spuds, red and yellow capsicum. I returned to the rainbow of eating.

Because all it seemed I had been eating up until that tipping point of 'enough!' was silverbeet and kale. With the plants in my garden taking advantage of the (fleeting) warm spring weather (dear reader, we have been up and down lately, with quite a lot of snow-on-the-mountain plunging us back into our winter woolllens), I was suddenly dealing with an awful lot of leafy greens. 

 

Sometimes I go thru these blinkered, perverse phases where I eat only what I grow, which is pretty silly when right now the only things I can harvest are silverbeet and kale. But it's like a kind of obsession: 'It's here, I grew it, I have to eat it! I can't waste it by buying other vegetables!'. My garden is a monoculture, my kitchen is a monoculture. My digestive system ... let's leave it at that.

It's not always been boring, and one can get inventive if forced too. I've been eating the greens with pasta sauce, with nutty chickpeas and plenty of onions, with toasted almonds and other garnishes to disguide their greenness. I've made the ubiquitous vegie slice. I've discovered a dressing of lemon juice and walnut oil pairs beautiful with the earthiness of silverbeet.

 

I have an Ottolenghi recipe (right now, who doesn't?) that I want to try where the silverbeet (or chard as it called in the northern hemisphere) is sauteed in wine; it's the one technique I haven't yet tried, and let's face it, just about anything tastes better when cooked in a little booze.

 

I even dabbled in 'cucina povera' - peasant food; in Italian, it sounds so much fancier - where I dressed some lightly steamed, limey green stalks with walnut oil and black sesame seeds. I thought it looked rather elegant.

 

 

The silverbeet is now going to seed very quickly (I'm sure because I cannot pick it fast enough), and unfortunately some of the kale is getting thick with those ugly grey aphids. The seeding towers of silverbeet will soon be delivered to mum's chooks (though the small baby leaves that pop out the stalks are still tender and delicious). But more seriously, I have decided that a dozen or so plants or silverbeet and the same of kale may look lush, but are not practical for a single person to consume. It is all growing faster than I can eat it (especially now I am eating other vegetables), and I really hate to grow food and then waste it. So when these plants are finished, next time I shall stick to a more managable two or three plants each.

 

 

But finally, a pretty non-green corner of my kitchen ... drat, some kale got in there, too!.