Collard greens

Now then – what are we going to do with this bunch of leaves? Looks a bit like horse food.

Might be similar to silver beet but the leaves are much thicker. Wholefoods had a big pile of ‘healthy greens’ with this being listed at the top so we wanted to take a closer look – they had a recipe tied onto them so that made it easier, a rice, ham and collard greens concoction.  We looked up collard greens on Wikipedia (thankfully we were cooking them on the day before Wikipedia went down to protest SOPA … hopefully by the time you’re reading this it will still be there) for some more info about them after I said they smelled a bit like cabbage when I started cutting them and apparently ‘cabbage plant’ is a common term and indeed the leaves are very healthy – vitamin C, fiber etc.

So we followed the recipe to chop them up and put them in a pot with rice, ham and chicken stock.

Simmered away for 25 mins and ta daaaa – a hearty, risotto-type dish, tasted quite meaty and the greens didn’t have an overwhelming flavor, hard to explain but cauliflowerish. Not bad, but not sure if we’d have it again. Plus our gas elements are incredibly frustrating and don’t quite go low enough that everything didn’t boil dry and stick to the bottom of the pot.