• fresh garlic
• collard greens
• scallions
• shell peas — don’t eat the pods, just the peas inside
• thyme

“Full” shares also contain:

• more garlic and peas
• “rainbow” beets
• baby zucchini

Veggie Notes

fresh garlic – This isn’t the young, tender stuff we had earlier. As the garlic plant matures, the stem thickens and hardens while the skin around the bulb starts to become tougher. You can still use the entire bulb (wrapper skins and all), but you’ll want to trim off the stem perhaps 1/2″ above the bulb.

collard greens – Collard greens can be used just like other cooking greens, but they have a more assertive flavor (like that of kale and other brassicas, such as broccoli and cabbage) a more robust texture. Don’t believe the old stories of fat, southern grandmas cooking these things all day with pigs feet; we boil them briefly in 1/2-3/4″ of lightly salted water in a wide, shallow pan. You could also steam them. We also make a great tomato-based pasta sauce with collards for which I’m having trouble finding a recipe. I’ll let you know when I find it.

shell peas – Unlike in previous weeks, these are shell peas and the pod cannot be eaten. I know, I know: it’s a lot of work to shell peas, but — to my tongue — the convenience of snap peas still doesn’t hold a candle to the great flavor of shell peas. While we cook snap peas in all sorts of dishes (stir fries and pastas, notable), we almost never cook shell peas because we always end up eating them all as we’re shelling them.

beets – Remember that the leaves of beets (aka `beet greens’) can be eaten like Swiss chard. The tend to be a bit more tart, but they’re still pretty good. If you want to preserve the distinct colors of the rainbow beets, you should steam them or roast them. If you boil them, they’ll all end up kind of red. See below for roasting instructions … well, not so much instructions as guidelines.

Recipe Ideas

Finding recipes is perhaps the hardest part of writing these newsletters. We’ve been cooking with fresh, whole foods for so long that we don’t really use recipes anymore, instead relying on “techniques” with generous injections of experience-influenced intuition to guide our hand to great meals. To that end, I’ll treat one of our most versatile and trustworthy techniques as recipe.

You will need:
a vegetable, or vegetables, to roast
salt and pepper
a fat to roast in – bacon fat is best, olive oil is great, and other vegetable oils will work too
a pan to roast in – large enough to accommodate the veggies in a single layer
optional: seasonings such as herbs and/or chili peppers

1. Turn on oven and preheat to 350 or so.
2. Clean, trim and chop the veggies into pieces that are approx. the same same size. The size of gaming dice is a good size — smaller is too much work and too much larger will take forever to cook.
3. Toss the veggies with the oil or fat, a good pinch of salt, several turns of the pepper grinder and — if using — the seasonings.
4. Spread the chopped, oiled, seasoned vegetables into the roasting pans and place into the oven.

Roasting times will depend upon the vegetable being roasted as well as the size into which it has been chopped. In general 30-45 minutes is a good amount of time to roast. If the veggies are cut smaller or thin, they will cook more quickly; if they are cut large or are spread in the pan thickly, they will cook more slowly. The test for being “done” is that the veggies will be “fork tender”, i.e. that they will yield easily to a fork.

Roasted Beets
Using what we’ve just said, let’s roast today’s beets:

1. Clean, trim and chop the beets into 1/2″ cubes.
2. Chop up about 1/2 of the bunch of thyme.
3. Drizzle the chopped beets w/ olive oil to coat and toss with the chopped thyme and a good pinch of salt and pepper.
4. Spread the beets into a roasting pan — we used a 9″x9″ pan.
5. Place in oven and roast. As I’m writing, the beets have been in for about 45 minutes and are getting close to done. By 1 hour, they should be perfect!

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns or problems.

We hope you enjoy the share!