Recipes from Cooking with Doyle Moore on Focus 580
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Cooking on Focus 580: Recipes for May 2008
May 7, 2008: Wild Greens
Spring is here and a lot of people like to make an expedition of going out and gathering greens. Doyle remembers getting dandelion greens as a child, though he wasn’t overwhelmed by them. David’s experience with greens is not so positive: the style of cooking seems to have been to cook them forever which he finds not so pleasant – a green sort of mush, sometimes bitter in taste. There is a great southern appeal of cooked greens; some are available in stores, but some are either home-grown or found wild.
SOUTHERN-STYLE GREENS – WITHOUT BITTERNESS
In southern cooking of greens, you always put just a little bit of sugar in. To avoid the bitterness of cooked greens, use pepper vinegar on. This condiment was always on the table in Doyle’s house. Boil the vinegar and pour it over tiny hot peppers. It takes away the bitterness and gives a sour taste. A caller from Urbana points out that reactive cooking pans (like aluminum) can bring out the bitterness in greens. If you cook in nonreactive pans like pyrex or enameled ware like Le Creuset, those seems to help in minimizing bitterness of greens.
A caller from Sidney offered this way to do greens generally: fry out bits of ham or smoked pork or bacon so you have the grease from the meat, then toss the greens in and cook them down a little bit until they wilt and clump up; then pour water in and boil them. Always do it in that order. Then depending on the kind of green, you could boil it for 30 minutes or 2 hours! Collards take longer, turnips and beets are done very quickly.
A caller from Champaign ate greens growing up. Her father had the Foxfire books which are good sources of wild plants to eat, with some good parameters so that you don’t eat the wrong parts of plants. She has collected a lot of recipes, some from other cultures, which she has to try hesitantly with her family. A CSA book she got a while ago, From Asparagus to Zucchini (Jones Books; 3rd edition, 2004; ISBN 0972121781), had a lot of good recipes for greens, some of which mask the flavor enough to get people to try them.
TURNIPS
Doyle is interested in turnips that are grown only for their tops (turnip greens).
A caller from Champaign is from the south and has memory of having greens with every dinner, mostly turnip greens; they had two seasons of turnips, winter and summer. The summer turnips were grown also for the turnips themselves, but the winter breed was different.
WILD ASPARAGUS
A caller who lives on the north side of Rantoul has two friends who go and hunt for wild asparagus – she doesn’t know exactly where. It is to die for! Doyle says that wild asparagus is often found in fence rows, because it is carried there by the birds. Those who know good spots for finding wild greens are probably not going to want to tell everyone where those places are! Doyle has had wild asparagus in Colorado. It has to be taken very young. A good place to find it is along the railroad. It’s the same plant as domestic asparagus just propagated by the birds.
A caller from Sidney has wild asparagus everywhere on their property; she’s sure her great-great-grandparents planted it originally. She knows where all the old fence rows were, because that’s where a lot of the asparagus is. Also, she knows where the old copses were, because the asparagus grows around the edges: the trees may have been pushed away, but the asparagus is still there. The asparagus often hides in the same place as poison ivy! Euell Gibbons’s trick for finding it: look for the fern in the summer and note where it grows, then go back to those spots the following spring to look for the new shoots. Be careful picking along highways because of the exhaust that’s in the soil. Beside railways is probably okay, as are little-used roads. She has just started trying asparagus on the grill and under the grill in the oven, and she finds it very sweet and tasty, but tough to cut. She has been reading Barbara Kingsolver’s new book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about eating locally and notes that the first chapter is called “waiting for asparagus.”
A caller from Champaign has this advice (actually from her husband, who is the gardener in the family) for people who can’t find wild asparagus: go to the farmers’ market and ask the growers what variety of asparagus they grow, because some of them actually have what is essentially a wild variety that retains the flavor, but they propagate it themselves.
KALE
A caller from Urbana has a recipe for kale that uses balsamic vinegar to cut the bitterness. But when you add acids to greens it turns their color to khaki or olive green instead of the nice bright luscious color. Doyle asked if the kale was cooked with the vinegar, or was the vinegar put on as a sauce after the greens are on the plate? Normally it is used as a sauce, but this recipe tells you to steam the kale in its own water and then sauté it in butter (or fake butter), raisins, and a little balsamic vinegar, very quick. You can grow kale in your garden all winter long.
RAMPS
A caller from Urbana reports that she finally had a chance to try ramps this year: she found some bulbs sticking up out of a floodplain last year and she transplanted them to where she could get at them more readily. They look like lily of the valley, but the two leaves are fatter and lighter green; it is related to the onion. The greens had a very mild oniony flavor and lovely deep green color; you can also eat the root. In Canada, the ramp is an endangered species and so you’re not allowed to pick them to eat there.
BEET GREENS
The same caller from Urbana bought some beets that had some nice greens on them, and Farmer John’s Cookbook (http://www.amazon.com/Farmer-Johns-Cookbook-Real-Vegetables/dp/1423600142) suggested serving beet greens with puréed white beans. She didn’t have any of those on hand, but she did have garbanzos, so she made some hummus and put the greens over the hummus after warming the hummus in the microwave. She hadn’t previously thought of warming hummus, but this was a quick way to have an interesting side dish.
NETTLES
A caller from Urbana asked about nettles, one of the greens that are eaten a lot in England. Nettles were introduced to the caller in wonderful garlic and nettle ravioli with a butter squash oil. She wonders, where would you find nettles other than by being stung by them when walking in the woods? It is the stinging nettle that is used to eat. Doyle imagines that it is found someplace moist, by waterways. [You can find information and pictures at this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stinging_nettle ] It cooks down like spinach with a nice leafy greeny taste.
DANDELION GREENS
A caller from Sidney comments that in north of England they say if you’re coming to dinner on Sunday, you have to let them know by Tuesday so they can get the greens on to cook! She asks about dandelion greens, is it too late to get them once the dandelions have started to bloom? Yes, but you can probably take some of the smaller basal leaves; the large leaves have a lot of sap in them and are very bitter. Another thing you can do to eliminate the bitterness of dandelion greens is parboil them, then throw that water away and start over again.
Doyle points out that you can buy (cultivated) dandelion leaves at Meijer’s.
GREENS IN STATE PARKS?
A caller from Urbana has always wanted to find some good edible plants when he goes camping. This weekend he’s going camping about an hour south of here in Walnut Point; can you harvest greens from state parks? Doyle thinks you wouldn’t be destroying cultures of anything. David’s guess is that you probably shouldn’t do that, there would be a concern about destroying anything rare or endangered. You could call the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and ask; or you might find them in the park and then go outside of the park to find the same things.
A call from campus adds No, thou shalt not pick plants in state parks. It’s very much against the law! But you can pick greens along the road on the way to the park.
MOREL MUSHROOMS, etc.
The hiker from Urbana asks for recommendations of what to look for. Morel mushrooms, some of them are out now and are a good foraging item. Get the book Stalking the Wild Asparagus (by Euell Gibbons; Alan C. Hood & Company, 2005; ISBN 0911469036) which should be available in libraries. Make sure you know what it is before you eat anything: you don’t want to be like Elvira Madigan and sicken from oxalic acid. Oxalic acid is abundant in many plants, especially lambs’ quarters, sour grass, sorrel, and rhubarb (that’s why you don’t eat the leaves or roots of rhubarb).
There is a Peterson field guide (the same folks who do the bird books) available for wild plants, and there are others. If you are interested in going out and want to know what is okay to eat, you can go to the bookstore or library and get one of these field guides to take with you when you go out. Sometimes nature study centers will have walks in which they show you how to find things to eat.
A caller from Belgium wants to speak out for the morel mushroom. There are several different types: gooseneck, black, grey, yellow. The latter three are all very edible, and are predictable when they will appear.
MILKWEED PODS AND LILY BUDS
A caller from Campus recalls that back in her Euell Gibbons days, she loved to get very young pods of milkweed and steam those lightly with a little bit of salt, a little bit of butter, so sweet and tasty. Doyle suggests: a little later in the year, when the day lilies are out, get day lily buds that have not opened (get the ditch lilies that are all over the place in the roadways); steam them or boil lightly, they are so good. The Chinese use day lily buds in hot and sour soup, you can buy them dried in Chinese food stores.
DOCK
A caller from Paris reports that her grandfather (born in 1890) taught her about greens. She just had a mess of the narrow ruffled leaf of dock (curly dock; the root is yellow). The leaves are better when they are small, but you can use the large ones. Steam them with butter and vinegar. Grandfather said he had to have his greens every day, it was sort of his spring tonic. You can throw in a few dandelion leaves to add a little more twang. The man who is going to be camping at Walnut Point should be able to find some dock along the roadside; you also find it in fairgrounds, along railroad tracks, along the edge of the yard if you don’t use chemical weed killers. You can use dock the same way you use kale in cooking with potatoes and beans and making soups, would be a tasty substitute.
ELDERBERRY BLOSSOM FRITTERS
Doyle learned about “bess”, which are elderberry blossom fritters, from Czech friends in Chicago. About two weeks before the Fourth of July we’ll have the blossoms here. He just makes regular pancake batter, even out of bisquick; take the umbels of the blossoms and dip them in the batter and then fry in a little bit of grease. Use scissors to clip off the top, then flip them over and fry on the other side, serve with a little brown sugar. In some places it’s called “elderberry blow.”
PLANTAIN (PLANTAGO)
A caller from Vermilion County has a couple of horses and when she is brushing out their hair, she watches what they are eating. In the spring, they hunt the dandelions and the plantains [i.e., plantago] and suck them out of the ground and enjoy them with great relish. Do people eat plantains too? Doyle doesn’t know, but he would trust the horse.
POKE
A caller from Belgium thinks that poke is one of the most beautiful ornamental plants with purple flowers. Legend has it that you should eat one pokeberry a season for arthritis. Doyle’s father used to make ink out of pokeberries when he was a schoolchild around 1900. The berries are not poisonous as some people think, they are just bitter and purple. When you eat the greens for poke salad, which you are going to cook down, you want them less than 6 inches tall.
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