Reviving Greens

Every week I give people advice about how to pep up greens.  You know the ones.  Maybe they sat in the car a bit too long before you were able to complete your daily tasks.  Or maybe they sat in the fridge, exposed to the cold air for too long.  Or maybe you picked them up from your CSA and they were already wilting.  Who knows.  You have two options.  Get rid of them in some way (compost, garbage, feed them to the animals) or eat them.  Unless I have way way way too much of something, we generally eat them.  And they're really good too.  So here's a pictoral of what happened last week.

At this time of year, the plants grow really slowly.  We generally eat whatever I don't sell at the market.  So the veggies have been picked, sat out at market for at least 5 hours, come home and might not get unloaded right away, and then we store them.  As I'm sure you can imagine, they're sometimes a bit wilted.  Furthermore, I might then store them for a week or more before use.  Here's an example of 2 bunches of chard and a bunch of collards that were about a week (or more) into storage:

The chard on the left was about 2 weeks old, the one on the right only about a week old.

This is a bunch of wilted collards.

They were pretty wilted but were otherwise fine.  As long as they're not slimy or something, they're fine.  So I chopped them up and tossed them in the spinner.  Here they are prior to soaking:

Then I soaked them in cold water for about 20 minutes or so.  Here's how they looked after that:

I then tossed them into a pan along with some onions and turnips.  These are white egg turnips which were only about golf-ball sized when I picked them.  They'll get a little bigger but not as big as the American Purple Top.  They're very sweet and tender enough that I don't peel them at all - just scrub them up a little, chop them up and toss them in the pan.

This was a nice, tasty dish.

So the next time you consider tossing out your wilted greens, think again.  This works for lettuce, spinach, choi, collards, kale, chard, etc.

Enjoy!