By Kathy Hester
I’ve become a little obsessed with greens. It goes beyond the typical kale, collards, or rainbow chard. It’s creeping into previously unknown territory and I’m enjoying the ride!
This week is radish green week at my house. One reason is that the radish seeds I planted in my garden this year are refusing to be radishes and insisting on only growing greens. I’ll admit, I planted winter radishes instead of the spring ones, but I was too tempted by the name watermelon radishes to resist.
I Googled radish greens and a whole world opened up to me. I found radish greens pesto covered pasta plated up on square dinnerware, cooked up with garlic and served like collards, and even as the main ingredient of a delicate green soup.
This, of course, led to another green – carrot tops. Scrambled eggs with lightly sauteed carrot tops mixed in, use them as a garnish to dress up your dinnerware, or even make a rice soup with them minus the delicious roots that we are used to eating.
Then I got to thinking about mixing and matching and found out about gumbo z’herbs. Supposedly, it’s a traditional New Orleans dish eaten at Lent. I say supposedly, because in living there for 12 years I never heard or saw it. I asked my friend who’s a native New Orleanian and she hadn’t seen it either. I guess that really doesn’t matter because I’m going to see it tomorrow when I make it for the first time.
Like any gumbo there are as many recipes as there are cooks, but the main ingredient in all of them is a mixture of greens. I found that it’s a tradition to use an odd number of greens and that parsley gets to count as one of them. As do many good New Orleans dishes, it starts with a roux. A roux is a mixture of brown pan toasted flour with butter that is used as a thickener. You can also use file powder that helps thicken up the mix and is used in okra-less gumbos.
Select and assortment of greens including any of these you can get your hands on: collards, mustard greens, dandelion, chard, kale, chicory, radish, carrot tops, turnip, beet, parsley, or watercress. Find a gumbo z’herbs recipe and join me in a cook- a -long this week.
