Collard greens and clementines ~ Week of December 29th

These red potatoes are literally the most beautiful potatoes I've ever seen. They're like gorgeous glowing gems!

This box will be my last one for a while. I take breaks periodically to reevaluate if getting a CSA box is still the right fit for my lifestyle and my budget. Unfortunately the farmer’s market near my house is closed until April, so I need a new produce plan, stat. I’ve found over the last month or so that I’m composting more than I’d like when I don’t cook certain items in time. This is always a good indication that I need to switch over to more targeted shopping, where I plan menus and get ingredients for them, rather than the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants style of having a mystery assortment of fruits and vegetables arrive every other week. I love both methods and they tend to each work best for me at different times of my life.

I know the theme of this blog is “what comes in my CSA box,” but never fear! For starters, if you’re checking out CSA services for yourself, you can still find records of the box contents of three different CSAs – Eatwell Farms, Eating with the Seasons, and my current CSA, Farm Fresh to You – over in the righthand navigation column. For example, clicking on “Box Contents – Farm Fresh to You” will show you almost two years of box contents through the seasons, letting you check out the quantity and quality of the produce throughout the year.

Beyond the cataloguing of what arrives in a typical Bay Area CSA box, this blog is intended to be a resource for what to do with all those fruits and veggies, some of which can be quite mysterious, and perhaps others of which you’ve only ever tasted cooked in the most unpleasant ways. Even though I won’t be getting a CSA box right now, I’ll still be focusing on providing plenty of inspiration for what to do with seasonal bounty, whether it comes in a box or from the market.

In the righthand column under Categories you’ll find the Menu Plan Monday link, which will take you to two years’ worth of weekly menu plans, many with links, recipes, cookbook recommendations, and photos, with every meal including a variety of fresh, seasonal produce. The Recipes section (near the top of the righthand column) is organized by category – soups, vegetable sides, main-dishes, desserts, DIY ingredients – with a notation if the recipe is vegan and/or gluten-free (they almost all are). And the tag cloud (at the very bottom of the righthand column) allows for you to search for recipes by ingredient – just click on “chard” to see posts, recipes, and meal plan ideas featuring chard. (Some veggies don’t show up in the tag cloud for some reason – just search for anything that doesn’t appear there in the “Search” box at the top of the righthand column under the calendar.)

So despite my box hiatus, In My Box will go on. 2011 has been a distractingly busy year so far and I’m terribly behind on my posting, but I have lots of fun recipes and photos just waiting to be shared!

A “maybe I will or maybe I won’t” vegan, gluten-free Menu Plan Monday

I’ve had it marked off on my calendar for weeks. From November 28th through December 4th runs a big blue line reading “Personal Retreat?” It has been a really, really busy few months. Since March I’ve been enjoying a level of activity and socializing I hadn’t experienced since getting sick over five years ago. But even though I’ve been having a great time, now I’m in an energy deficit, so I thought it might be nice to take a week off from plans and activities and just hunker down at home.

A variety of vacuum-packed meals from Gobble Green

A few weeks ago I signed up through Groupon to get a heavily-discounted delivery of a week’s worth of vegan, gluten-free meals from a company called Gobble Green. They’re down in my giant second freezer now – seven days worth of breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, and snacks. One of the things I spend the most energy on each week is planning, shopping, and cooking for meals, so I thought I might take advantage of having this week of prepared food to treat myself to a real break. But here’s the thing… I really like seeing my friends. I don’t have enough time as it is to see everyone I’d like to as often as I’d like. And I’m going on an actual weeklong silent meditation retreat later in December. So now that the time has come I’m finding myself reluctant to stick to this personal retreat plan.

Mostly what I want to catch up on (besides rest, which is the most important thing, obviously) is my darn Project Life. It’s a very cool photo-a-day project that I began back in January and was doing really well on. But then I started to get behind this summer and now I haven’t made it past June! My printer broke, so I couldn’t keep up with printing photos, I got behind on the “journaling” (which is writing a little card to go with each photo) because it takes a good amount of time, and at a certain point I started forgetting or actively putting off taking my photo each day. But I really want to see this project through. I do have photos for a lot of the days between June and now (significantly more than I would have if I hadn’t been doing this project), so I just need a good chunk of time to organize the photos on my computer, have them printed at Walgreen’s, and then write up the sixty million journal cards to go with each picture. This is the kind of project I never finish, so I really want to show myself I can do it. And that means getting caught up before the end of 2010.

All this is a really long way of saying I’m going to make a menu plan for this week. I do have a CSA box coming on Wednesday, for one thing. If I decide to keep running around like a wind-up toy this week, I’ll have the menu to follow. If I decide to do the personal retreat thing, I can just nosh on veggies and stuff from my box but mostly live on my Gobble Green meals and use the menu the following week. Either way I’m a winner, right?

Cranberry sauce cobbler to use up Thanksgiving leftovers

This week’s Gluten Free Menu Swap is hosted by our lovely organizer Cheryl of Gluten-Free Goodness with the theme of sweet potatoes. I have sweet potatoes left from my last box and another two pounds coming in this week’s box, so it is definitely a sweet potato menu this week! I have sweet potatoes on the menu almost every day! Good thing I love them, eh?

For a giant round-up of menu plans from all over the web, check out the Menu Plan Monday compendium over at OrgJunkie!

Monday
Kohlrabi, sweet potato, and celeriac rosti, veganized
Green salad with apple, radish, and carrots

Tuesday (defrost soup!)
Roasted root veggies with carrots, sweet potato, beets, white potato, onion, and garlic
Lentil soup (from the freezer)

Wednesday
Sunrise noodles with gingered greens and tofu, with baby bok choy and chard

Thursday
Sweet potato, pea, and spinach curry
Quinoa

Friday
Pumpkin polenta with avocado salsa
Green salad with pumpkin seeds and pears

Saturday (defrost 3 C. broth!)
Acorn squash, sweet potato and apple soup
GF biscuits

Sunday
Leftovers

Desserts
What Do I Do With My Leftover Cranberry Sauce? Cobbler
Cranberry sorbet

Green apples and red grapes ~ Week of November 3rd

What a ridiculously busy week it’s been. My box arrived and I actually left it out overnight so I could take a picture of the contents the next day. But the next day I had to just put everything in the fridge when it became clear there was not going to be any time to be staging a CSA box photo-shoot. Then the day after that I hauled everything back out of the fridge to take a picture. I was going to just skip it, but I skipped it last time, and that is basically the fundamental point of this blog, right? Showing you what comes in my CSA box?

It was a nice box this week. The grapes were fantastic – perfect in flavor and texture – and I can’t wait to make turnip pickles with the baby turnips. The friend with whom I’ve been sharing all my meals lately is terribly picky but loves salad, so the lettuce will be put to better use than it usually is in this household. He loves green beans, too, come to think of it, so it looks like I scored in that department.

As a sidebar, cooking for a picky eater is actually kind of fun. I don’t have kids yet so I’ve never had to do some of the culinary contortions other bloggers have reported on; with a picky adult I feel perfectly comfortable cooking whatever I want and if he ends up not liking it he can make himself a quesadilla. But it really has been sort of an adventure. There are things he didn’t know if he liked or not, like kale (turns out he does) and things he knew he didn’t like, like nutmeg (until he ate several squares of my butternut squash lasagna last week), and I’m having a great time turning all those suppositions on their heads. And I suppose he’s doing his own share of pushing the boundaries of what I think I like – who knew I’d love Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World?

In the box this week:
Granny Smith apples (2 lbs)
D’Anjou pears (2)
Comice pears (2)
Leeks (1 bunch)
Turnips (1 bunch)
Bok choy (1.5 lb)
Green beans (1 lb)
Chard (1 bunch)
Carrots (1 bunch)
Leaf lettuce (1 head)
Celery (1 bunch)
Yellow onion (1 lb)

There were supposed to be persimmons but I must have them on my “no” list; I got yummy yummy red grapes instead. I did only get 3 out of the 4 pears, though. Sigh…

Blueberries and beets ~ Week of June 2nd

This week was an extra jam-packed box o’ delights because Farm Fresh To You replaced the two items that had been left out of my previous box. There is so much stuff I really love to cook in this box! Cauliflower, beets, bok choy, broccoli, potatoes – it’s pretty much a total winner. The two heads of lettuce (one makes up for last time) are even welcome, rather than overwhelming, thanks to the delicious jar of Vegan Express vinaigrette I have in the fridge, ready to top any and all salad fixings.

This week’s box contained:
Honeydew melon
Blueberries
2 bunched of beets (1 from this week’s box, 1 replacement)
Cauliflower
Butter lettuce
Red leaf lettuce
Baby broccoli
Klamath Pearl potatoes
Yellow peaches
Baby bok choy
Rosemary

Much of the box has already been spoken for on my most recent menu, thanks to the ability to look ahead at what will be arriving from the farm. Now I’ll start fantasizing about what to do with the rest!

Avocados and Iceberg ~ Week of May 5th

Sorry for the long radio silence, friends. I was really enjoying getting into a rhythm with fellow bloggers and with menu planning! But last week was glorious, glorious vacation from everything! Unfortunately the one thing that doesn’t feel rested and renewed is my wrists – I have sporadic yet persistent RSIs from an old job. So this is going to be a short post (because I really shouldn’t be typing at all – bad girl!) but I want to at least keep my box contents up to date!

So this week’s box (err… in the sense where “this week” means “two weeks ago”) was a lovely treasure-trove of spring goodies. Some really simple things, but all of them gorgeous and of the highest quality!

In my box:
Avocados (2)
Baby broccoli (1 bunch)
Strawberries (1 basket)
Celery (1 bunch)
Zucchini (4 hearty ones)
Carrots (1 bunch)
Iceberg lettuce (1 head)
New potatoes (a bagful)
Grapefruit (2)
Navel oranges (2)
Radishes (1 bunch)
Chard (a giant bunch – this was in replacement for the fava beans that came in most boxes, as I have requested “NO favas!”)

Avocados and Artichokes: Week of April 21st

My very first box since December! What a delight!

Farm Fresh to You offers many options for what kind of box you can get, and I actually went back and forth about which one to order. I had come back to CSAing determined to get FFTY’s Valley Box, which is a box full of produce that comes only from the Capay Valley, from Capay Farms (which is FFTY’s farm) and surrounding farms. That means the travel distance would have been around 90 miles for my whole box. But when I looked at the variety and quantity of the Valley Box compared to FFTY’s Regular Box, which is the same price, I just felt like I needed to go with the Regular Box. It wasn’t so much the stuff like SoCal citrus and Washington apples that I felt I couldn’t do without – it just seemed like there was way less produce in the Valley Box, total. I may be wrong about this (it’s hard comparing pounds to bunches to pieces), and if I’m not I’m sure there are good reasons why the Valley Box is so much pricier than the Regular, but unfortunately financial factors do have to play a part in all my food-related decision-making, and I needed to go with the greater quantity in this case.

I remember when I first started getting a CSA box, from Eatwell Farms, and I took the box-contents list from my first box to the very pricy organic produce market near my house to compare prices. When I added it all up, my box cost as much if not more than shopping at a store I normally would only shop at for emergencies! I haven’t done a comparison with this one, but I get the feeling FFTY is actually a pretty good deal, and I have no idea what Eatwell charges these days. But that’s not really the point. Getting a CSA isn’t about getting cheaper food – it’s not a Costco-type situation. Subscribing to a CSA is about being connected to the people who bear all the risk and do all the work of growing the food we all need to survive.

As I’ve said in the past, “This is the bottom-line reality of our food system: If no one took the risks to grow the food, there would be nothing to eat. Organic and sustainable and ethical and biodynamic and all that may seem like a luxury (which they aren’t really, in the long run), but food itself is not. The burden of producing a necessary commodity under variable and uncertain circumstances (no widget factories to make our fruits and veggies) should not have to be entirely assumed by the producer.” I believe in this strongly, and I wish I could throw myself completely behind my principles by ordering the Valley Box, but it’s a good step for me just to be reconnecting with community supported agriculture once more.

So, enough pontificating, what’s in the box? Well, the first thing I noticed was a change from how FFTY was packing stuff back in December (at least I don’t remember it being like this). I opened up the box and there was a giant plastic bag filled with all the wet/damp/leafy stuff:

and underneath that bag was all the dry stuff and most especially the stuff that likes to stay dry. (I’ve had sweet potatoes rot before just from sitting in water dripping from some errant greens.) This seems like a great change to me. I like to photograph my box contents, which in the past meant unpacking each item from its plastic bag, photographing it all, and then rebagging it. So having to individually bag things before I put them in the fridge isn’t a problem for me. (I have 10,000 plastic bags from all my previous CSA boxes!) I am assuming it also saves on energy somewhere – whether the giant bag takes less energy/resources to make than individual bags, or some box-packers somewhere are less likely to get carpal tunnel by packing it like this, it seems like a good move to me!

So in my bag, and under that in my box were:

Braeburn apples (2)
Strawberries (1 lb)
Grapefruit (1)
Eureka lemon (1) (one half of this was rotten. too bad!)
Minneola tangelos (2)
Red radishes (1 bunch)
Chard (1 bunch)
Hass avocados (2)
Celery (1 bunch)
Romaine lettuce (1 huge head)
Zucchini (1 lb)
Broccoli (1 large bunch)
Bunched carrots (1 bunch)
Artichokes (2)
Garnet sweet potatoes (5 small)

The great apple cake caper

If there’s one thing I love more than a great recipe, it’s a great recipe that features ingredients that come in my CSA box. And if there’s something I love even more than that, it’s a great recipe that takes some piece of CSA produce that’s been sadly neglected and rescues it from certain composting.  As I’ve mentioned here before, we tend to be a bit on the picky side when it comes to fruit texture, and we can detect a less-than-crisp apple a mile off. They’re not rotten, though, so I can’t bear to toss them; instead they just sit on the glass cake plate we use as a fruit bowl, holding up remarkably well but certainly not getting any crisper.

Back in July I just couldn’t bear to look at the sad apple graveyard any longer. Cooking fruit goes a long way towards dealing with poor texture, so I must have looked at a billion recipes for apple crumble, crisp, and cake before I found a delicious-sounding recipe for Apple Upside-Down Cake. I only had enough apple rejects to make half a recipe, so I made it in a loaf, rather than square, pan. It turned out… amazing. Moist, dense, exquisitely flavored cake topped with perfectly cooked, caramelized apple slices. The kind of thing you dream of for months.

We were still dreaming of it, in fact, as we watched the apple casualties begin piling up again last month. This time I felt much more relaxed when less-than-stellar apples arrived in our box, knowing that their alchemical transformation into dessert gold was always near at hand. Except for one thing. When I finally went to look for the recipe last week, I couldn’t find it anywhere. I checked the binder where I keep hard copies of favorite recipes with my own notations and changes, combed frantically through my collection of recipes bookmarked online, and then finally just started searching randomly with Google, hoping to stumble across a recipe that sparked my memory. Part of the problem was that I couldn’t remember whether it had been a gluten-free recipe that I had veganized, a vegan recipe I had converted to gluten-free, or even that rarest of things, a recipe that was already both.

Tonight, as we were contemplating what to do with our evening after a busy day of guests, Duck said to me, “Let’s make an apple cake.” It was clearly the perfect thing to do. Except for that tiny hitch. I started the search again, looking at apple cake recipes far and wide. I must have looked for ten minutes when Duck came in and sat down next to me. “Have you tried searching your bookmarks?” Yep. “Your browsing history?” Yep. I kept typing and clicking, not really paying much attention anymore, when suddenly, there it was. I gasped. I remembered everything – the photo, the recipe, even the little story about the blogger having the cake for afternoon tea with her friend.

Needless to say, I bookmarked it, printed it out, and saved a copy to my hard drive. We had more than enough apples for a full-size version tonight, and it’s so good that Duck (normally the foremost despiser of anything involving cooked fruit) drew a line down the center of the cooled cake with a knife to make sure he got his fair share.

So here’s to you, Mrs. G.F. of Recipe for a Gluten Free Life. To you and your amazing, sublime, miraculous Apple Upside-Down Cake. For rescuing my mushy apples – twice! – and for reappearing out of the internet mists in the hour of my greatest need.

This recipe is, for me, ultimate comfort food. It assuages my guilt (no wasted produce!), and feels reasonably healthy (an apple a day and all that) rather than overly rich and heavy, which is actually pretty vital to a pleasurable dessert experience for me. I don’t tend to gravitate towards the big indulgences when it comes to sweets (not that this isn’t plenty indulgent!) – I save my overkill for the savory side of things. It’s warm, and it’s soft, and it’s sticky and sweet, and, this time around, I made it with someone I love. What could be more comforting than that? So I’m going to submit this to January’s Sugar High Fridays, which is hosted this month by A Merrier World, with the theme of Sweet Comforts.

The recipe, as  it turned out, was gluten-free, not vegan, so below is the vegan version with my very minor changes:

Apple Upside-down Cake (aka “What do I do with my old mealy apples?”)
Original recipe is from Recipe for a Gluten Free Life. God bless her for figuring out to make a Better Homes and Gardens recipe gluten-free. The first time I made the recipe, I used a gluten-free baking mix that didn’t have teff or sorghum flour, and it came out fantastic (as she assures us it will). This time I had on hand the exact flours she specifies and it came out even better. The teff is just indescribably good. But it’s great without it, too. One warning: this cake doesn’t keep well. All the sugar and fruit make it get too moist too fast. Best to eat it all right away, or at least within a day or so.

5 tablespoons Earth Balance (or other non-hydrogenated vegan margarine), cut into pieces
another 5 tablespoons Earth Balance, softened
1/3 cup packed brown sugar
4 apples, cored and sliced in wedges, skin on
1 large apple, peeled and chopped
1/4 cup teff flour
1/2 cup sweet sorghum flour
1/2 cup brown rice flour
1/4 teaspoon xantham gum
2/3 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2/3 cup soy or hemp milk
1/4 cup soy yogurt
2 teaspoons vanilla
3.9 oz applesauce, unsweetened (the size of a little packaged lunch-size tub)

Preheat oven to 350. Put the 5 T. chopped Earth Balance in the pan, a 9X9, and put in the oven until melted, but be careful not to brown it. Sprinkle brown sugar over Earth Balance, mix together. Put in the apple wedges and put back in the oven for 15 minutes.

In the bowl of your mixer (if you have one), combine flours and dry ingredients and whisk. Add wet ingredients, including the softened Earth Balance (the other 5 T. that you didn’t put in the oven), soy milk, soy yogurt, vanilla and applesauce. Use a mixer if you have one, otherwise stir until combined. Fold chopped apples into the batter.

Spread batter evenly over the apples in the pan. Bake about 35-45 minutes, or until knife inserted in center comes out clean. Cool completely, then invert carefully over a large plate. Serve with the apples all gorgeous and caramelized on top.

Starting out simple with a vegan, gluten-free Menu Plan Monday

Rice shells with broccoli rabe, arugula, and homemade tomato sauce

It’s been a long holiday season. I’m pretty tired and looking forward to some downtime to recover my energy. So for the first menu plan of 2010, here’s a simple menu plan for a (hopefully) simple week. I even found some pages of the Moosewood Cooks at Home cookbook that are online through google books, so I was able to link to the original recipes for you. Doesn’t get more simple than that! Almost everything else isn’t based on a recipe – it’s more a “throw a sweet potato in the toaster oven” and “simmer a can of diced tomatoes into a pot with spices and other stuff from the fridge” kind of week.

Monday
“Sloppy” sushi with Moosewood broiled tofu and Asian cabbage salad (made with Savoy cabbage) and toasted cashews

Tuesday
Butternut squash and sage soup, Udi’s GF toast with almond butter

Wednesday
Rice pasta shells with broccoli rabe, arugula, and homemade tomato sauce with Sicilian black olives, capers, red onion, garlic, baby potatoes, thyme and marjoram

Thursday
Braised kale with sesame oil, Veganomicon broiled lemon tofu with tahini sauce, brown rice

Friday
Baked sweet potato, polenta with tempeh bacon

And that’s it, because honestly I’ll be lucky if I make that many meals this week, and the rest will be Little Chihuahua, Best of Thai Noodle, and Tasty Bites.

Find more inspiration at the Gluten-Free Menu Swap, hosted this week by Asparagus Thin with the theme of Movies (so sorry, this would have been a really fun theme, but it was all I could do to pull together a menu – a theme was beyond me this week) and the huge round-up of Menu Plan Monday posts over at OrgJunkie.

Eating with the season on a vegan, gluten-free Menu Plan Monday

I’ve just arrived home from a fascinating four days at the Hazon Food Conference in Pacific Grove. The conference explored all kinds of interesting intersections, between environmentalism and food systems, Judaism and food ethics, social justice and foodie culture, personal financial investment and sustainable agriculture, and many more. I learned so much, both from the sessions and panels I attended as well as all the informal conversations I had with fellow conference-goers. You can read more about my time there here and here. I feel deep gratitude to the Joyce and Irving Goldman Family Foundation for sponsoring around 40 young adults, including me, providing full scholarships for all of us to the conference.

The Local Foods Wheel

On Sunday, right before we left for home, the conference had a big marketplace where folks could give out info and sell books they’d written or published, foods they’d made, and so on. At one of the tables I came across one of my favorite things ever, the San Francisco Bay Area Local Foods Wheel, being sold by one of the wheel’s creators. I first encountered the wheel, which is a stunning combination of gorgeous artwork and design with intriguing, well-presented information, on a refrigerator in the Spirit Rock kitchen when I was working back there during a retreat. (You’re not supposed to read anything on retreat, but who could resist those tiny, perfect line drawings with their little cursive labels?) Now it’s the most popular item on our refrigerator; every guest and visitor is magnetically drawn to it and we usually have to pull them away – they just want to stand there spinning it and spinning it and looking at every picture! The wheel shows on its top layer all the foods that are in season year-round in the Bay Area (and we’re lucky – there are so many of them!). Then you spin the top layer around to match up with the current time of year, and the bottom layer reveals the foods in season at this time.

Our CSA keeps us local and seasonal at every meal, but we’re not getting a box this week, so I turned to the wheel to help me plan this week’s menu. (My other goal for the week: use up all the lettuces from our box we’ve been keeping on life support for the past couple of weeks!)

For an assemblage of great, gluten-free menu plans, check out this week’s Gluten-Free Menu Swap over at The GF CF Cookbook. (The theme for this week’s swap is leftover ham, which, as a vegetarian, I can’t contribute to at all. I do have smoky beans and tempeh bacon this week, though, which are kind of the same flavor profile.) And, as always, for a huge round-up of menu plans from all over the web – and the world – check out the giant MPM compendium over at orgjunkie.

What’s in season:

Monday: Winter greens
Wine braised lentils over toast with Tuscan kale and pearl onions (Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Suppers)
Red leaf salad

Wine braised lentils over gluten-free quinoa toast with Tuscan kale and pearl onions

Tuesday: Butternut squash
Vegan “mac and cheese” made with butternut squash “cheese” and Tinkyada brown rice spirals
Romaine lettuce salad with balsamic vinaigrette

Wednesday: Brussel sprouts and wild mushrooms
Brussels sprouts and mushroom ragout with herbed vegan, GF dumplings (Vegetarian Suppers)
Mixed lettuces salad

Brussels sprouts ragout with wild mushrooms and herbed gluten-free dumplings

Thursday: From Duck’s mom’s garden!
Simple oven-roasted butternut squash
Arugula salad with sauteed red onions and toasted walnuts
Tangy red lentils
Quinoa with coconut oil

Friday: Savoy cabbage
Savoy cabbage gratin with tempeh bacon
Baked sweet potato
Homemade smoky pinto beans

Savoy cabbage gratin with tempeh bacon

Saturday: Parsnips, winter radishes, rutabegas
Roasted root vegetables with home-grown rosemary
Chard and walnut yum
Impressionist cauliflower

Sunday: Meyer lemons
Roasted broccoli with meyer lemon zest and pine nuts
“Sloppy” sushi with balsamic-glazed portobello mushrooms

Seasonal extras: Turnips and pomelos
Middle Eastern-style turnip pickles

A fresh batch of turnip pickles (with beet for color)

Candied pomelo peel

Candied Pomelo Rinds Dipped in Bittersweet Chocolate

Collard Greens and Butternut Squash ~ Week of December 16th

Braised Collard Greens and Beet Greens with Tomato, Red Onion, and Tempeh Bacon

This week in our Small Mixed box from Farm Fresh to You:

Satsuma mandarins (1.5 lb)
Pink Lady apples (1.5 lb)
Savoy cabbage (3 lb)
Collard greens (1 bunch)
Butternut squash (2 lb)
Salad mix (0.5 lb)
Leeks (1 lb)

I was a huge fan of collard greens in college. I used to boil them for a long, long time until they were super tender and then eat them with lemon juice and hot pepper flakes. I never ate collards growing up or had any other exposure to them, rather I knew about the idea of collard greens, as this slow-cooked Southern food that you cooked forever with a ham hock or something. So I just cooked my (vegetarian) version of this idea. After a trip to New Orleans I brought back a ton of Zatarain’s boxed mixes for Red Beans & Rice, Dirty Rice, and Jamabalaya. I would throw in cut-up veggie sausage and cook my collards and make these feasts that recreated a cuisine I had basically never eaten. (It’s impossible to actually eat this food in New Orleans if you’re vegetarian.)

I don’t boil greens for hours anymore. I try to give them a little more love and let their flavors stay bright and their nutrients stay in their leaves and not leach out into the cooking water. But collards can be tough, and they do need some attention to make them shine. I usually improvise a recipe based on a collard green technique from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison that has delicious Southern flavor (or what I imagine to be Southern flavor in my head) while still keeping the greens bright and lively. She recommends a brown butter sauce to replace the bacon flavor, but since we don’t eat butter I use tempeh bacon, and then I’ll throw in whatever other veggies seem like they’ll be happy in there, too.

Braised Collards, Veggie-Southern-style

2 bunches collards, long stems and tough ribs removed
Salt
1 onion (red or yellow), diced
2 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
1/2 tsp. red pepper flakes
5 strips tempeh bacon*, cut into small pieces
1 T. olive oil

Plunge the greens into a large pot of boiling salted water, cook them for 10 minutes and then remove to a bowl. Reserve 1/2 cup of the cooking water.

Heat the olive oil in a wide skillet (I use a wok) over medium heat. Add onion and pepper flakes, stirring occasionally until the onion is beginning to soften. Add the garlic and tempeh bacon and cook, stirring occasionally, until the garlic is lightly colored and the tempeh lightly browned. Add the greens, their reserved cooking water, and 1 tsp. salt. Cook for 30 minutes and taste again for salt. They can use a lot, but the tempeh bacon should bring a lot of flavor.

Variations: You could add tomatoes, peanuts, bell peppers, cubes of cooked yam… the sky is the limit! In the photo above, I used one of bunch collards, one of beet greens, and added tomatoes.

*The brand of tempeh bacon I use – Lightlife – is flavored with a soy sauce that contains wheat, so it is NOT gluten-free. You can make your own tempeh bacon from Veganomicon. I recommend making a big batch of thin slices and then freezing it to thaw as needed.