AKICILJ: the bitter green edition

[mrissa]

timprov has already done the grocery shopping this morning, because he is efficient like that, and he has returned home with beets. Red beets! Golden beets! We have beets. We also have plans for beets.

What we do not have plans for, but have quantities of anyway, is beet greens. They come attached to the beets. They are huge and luxurious and occupying more of our fridge than I really expected.

Does anybody know of anything nice that can be done with beet greens? My mother is not fond of this type of green, so my first line of culinary inquiry is not helping this time around. I like recipes, but I also like "cook 'em for awhile with some of this and some of that" level of specificity--does not have to be measured in tablespoons. (Or coffee spoons. Or T.S. Eliot.) (Bonus points for T.S. Eliot, though.)

Comments

[stillnotbored.livejournal.com]

To my knowledge I've never eaten a beet green, so I'm going to fail you here.

But as some people get earwormed for music, I get earwormed for poetry. I need to read some Eliot now. There will be time.

[sraun]

Do you think they'd work as the greens in this soup?

I've run across a variant of the soup that uses cream, Italian sausage and some herbs that I expect to find in an Italian herb mix. It uses about a quarter of the liquid - next time I make the soup, I'm going to cut way</> back on the water!

[ellarien]

I've had beet greens fresh out of the garden that were just cooked on their own -- in a big pan with a little water until they wilt -- and they were quite tasty like that, but I don't know if that works if they weren't picked five minutes before they go in the pan.

(I have my doubts about the tenses in that sentence.)

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

It does, but I find they need butter, vinegar and salt to make them palatable in that case. (They get a little tough.)

[lthomas987.livejournal.com]

I have had some lovely things with beet greens. Um... sauted mostly, like kale or collard greens. We got a ton of weird greens in our CSA share this summer mostly we cooked them in the same sorts of ways.

With beet greens we fried some bacon (which was cut in little pieces first), then used the bacon fat to cook the onions and garlic. Deglaze with a little 3/4-1cup stock or wine or water or whatever's handy. Bring the liquid to a boil, add greens cover and cook until tender. Add a bit of vinegar and the bacon crumbled up back.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

That's what I was going to say, except use more garlic and no onions. As you know, Bob, garlic is a vegetable. And also lots and LOTS of bacon because bacon is yummy. I'd say taste before adding vinegar, then pick cider or wine vinegar depending on how bitter the greens are.

[clarentine]

I'm afraid most of them would be going out to my compost pile, were they in my kitchen (after I ate all those lovely beets!), but you can steam or cook them much like any other green - stir fry, stewed in broth with ham and onion, probably in salads too, though those are probably too mature to make really good salad greens.

[jbru.livejournal.com]

I would try what I do with spinach:
Wash the leaves and run them through a salad spinner.
Bring a largish pot of salted water to a boil.
While that is boiling, stack up 6-8 leaves at a time, roll them up and slice the roll with a sharp knife, making nifty little ribbons.
Toss the ribbons into the water and swirl them around with spoon.
Drain them after only a little bit, probably less than a minute. (I drain them through my salad spinner bowl.)
Run the wilted leaf ribbons through the salad spinner again.
Toss with olive oil, basalmic vinegar, some garlic, salt, pepper and maybe a little parmesan.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Hot bacon fat is also good as a dressing on the blanched breens. Not healthy, but good.

There are several Italian and other Mediterranean soup recipes that mix lentils or beans with greens added in near the end.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

So that's what a salad spinner is for!

[jbru.livejournal.com]

Yep. Get the water off so the oil can stick!

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I would use it for making spinart, myself.

[carbonel]

I have not actually done anything myself with beet greens, but there sure are a lot of interesting recipes that use them. (Yes, I know you can google perfectly well, too, but I was curious, and thought I might as well make use of that curiosity by passing on the results.)

This one and this one particularly caught my eye.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I believe they compost nicely.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

I have sauteed them with sesame seeds, I think, and peanut or sesame oil. You can also chop in a tiny bit of chopped cooked beet, it makes it clearer that the beet greens taste like beets, if you see what I mean.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Everybody likes sesame seeds.

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

Quiche.

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

I think I've only done them sauteed in olive oil with lots of garlic, but almost anything that you might do with chard can be done with beet greens. (Chard is basically a beet that's been bred for its leaf rather than its root.)

[pameladean]

I'd cook them with black-eyed peas, garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, and maybe a pinch of sugar.

P.

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

I was hoping someone would mention black-eyed peas.

Mris, you're making me jealous.

Another idea: wilt those greens whole and serve fish over the leaves. Pretty!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

One of the disadvantages of having timprov do the grocery shopping this early is that the fish counter was not yet open, so we have no fish.

I suppose we could go get fish tomorrow or something, if we were feeling really motivated.

[cathshaffer.livejournal.com]

At first I thought you were looking for recipes for preparing them for your mother, who does not like beet greens, and I was stumped, because I do not know a way to make them not beet greens. Kind of makes me think of my father-in-law, who hates turkey, and for some perverse reason takes charge of the turkey every thanksgiving to try to make it suit his tastes, which is impossible, because it's still turkey. LOL.

Beet greens are pretty bitter. I like to sautee greens with garlic. For beet greens, I would mix them with a mild green like spinach or kale to cut down the intensity. I sautee them in a wok, then add minced garlic when they're about half wilted. (To get a reasonable meal out of them, you need to pile them high in the wok and then wait until they wilt a bit to start stirring them.) Lots of garlic. Delicious. I also think sesame seeds are a great idea.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, I'm not mad keen on turkey, either, but I recognize its essential turkeyness and focus my energies on things like a nice zippy sauce for the peas. Go figure. But no, Mom would not thank me if I put a lot of time and energy into making beet greens that were, under a pile of seasonings and toppings, still beet greens. So it's best that no one wants that.

[cathshaffer.livejournal.com]

"I know you'll like them this time!" LOL

[lotusice.livejournal.com]

In Samoa, you use taro greens like this:

Cut out a fair amount of the lower stalk, and the tip of the leaf. (Probably an old wives' tale that cutting the tip off keeps the bitterness away but doesn't hurt.) Make a "bowl" out of a few taro leaves, then shred up the rest and put them in the bowl. Add coconut cream. (Cream, not milk, not juice... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_cream)

You can add onions if you want, or even fish or chicken. Salt is good.

Fold the extra leaves over the whole thing and bake it for around half an hour. You can wrap it in tinfoil if you want, but the leaves alone should work.

The resulting stuff is usually eaten heaped up on pieces of steamed or roasted taro. You could probably put it on potatoes or bread.

Real palusami is unbelievably addictive. I've had it made with spinach and was less impressed - I'd bet beet is closer to the original and might be pretty nice, depending on your coconut tolerance. I'm a huge coconut fan.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That sounds like it would be so awesome if I could stand coconut. Sigh. I keep trying it with hopes that this will have changed.

[lotusice.livejournal.com]

"I know you'll like it this time!" :D

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Heh. Yes, but it's better to do that to oneself than have it imposed from the outside.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

I do that too. So far I have become accustomed to coconut milk in Thai curries, but only if they're so hot I can't taste anything. This is suboptimal, and I've decided to stop trying.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Are you coming back for Fourth Street? If you are, we could go to Peninsula or Rice Paper, and you could sit next to people eating coconut in things but could stay strictly de-coconutted yourself.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Let's do it! We can be the Unbecoconutted Corner.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

There is much unbecoconutted awesome to be had at these places, I assure you.

Beet Greens

[hairyape68.livejournal.com]

Swiss chard is indeed a variety of beet (Beta vulgaris)selected for the greens rather than the root. The Romagnolis' Table suggests boiling leaves and stems, draining, and dressing with olive oil and lemon juice. We cook the stems about 2 minutes, add the leaves to cook for another 2 minutes. These are good even without any dressing, but oil and vinegar are good too.

For beet greens, I'd try eating some of the stems raw. If they are very tough and flavorless, then maybe they should be cooked separately, so they can be thrown out if they don't cook up nicely. Otherwise, treat as chard. We do.

Beet greens

[hairyape68.livejournal.com]

Swiss chard is indeed a variety of beet (Beta vulgaris)selected for the greens rather than the root. The Romagnolis' Table suggests boiling leaves and stems, draining, and dressing with olive oil and lemon juice. We cook the stems about 2 minutes, add the leaves to cook for another 2 minutes. These are good even without any dressing, but oil and vinegar are good too. I'd try eating some of the stems raw. If they are very tough and flavorless, then maybe they should be cooked separately, so they can be thrown out if they don't cook up nicely.

[cattitude.livejournal.com]

Chop one T.S. Eliot, coarse...

[cissa.livejournal.com]

They are work-alikes for Swiss chard. In fact, Swiss chard is a beet variety grown for greens rather than roots.

I usually either discard the stems and cook the greens, or cook the stems with onions etc. first, and add the greens later.

Sometimes beet stems get chunks of soil embedded in them; watch out for that because they will make your food gritty.

ETA: Also: they are not bitter greens; they are pretty mild.

[talimena.livejournal.com]

I like them sauteed with garlic and then tossed in pasta with some cooked beets and some goat cheese or feta. I also like them cooked like kale, collards, etc., but find the sweetness of the beets complements them very well.

[cloudscudding.livejournal.com]

They cook up nicely in any recipe calling for greens--chard, spinach, etc. They also are very tasty in borscht (along with the beets).

[hbevert.livejournal.com]

Nice to see some other comments regarding the beet greens' similarity to Swiss chard. Making a chard recipe with beets instead was the first thing that came to mind. Take four coffee spoons of olive oil and saute the thoroughly washed greens in it. You may want to cut the leaf off the stem and cook the stems first before adding the leaves. Add a splash (about another four coffee spoons) of balsamic vinegar, some chopped walnuts and serve over spaghetti with some gorgonzola as a garnish.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'm not going to say I'll eat anything that goes well with walnuts and gorgonzola, but the statistics seem to lean that way.