Food 18: Non-virtuous greens

the fun ones taste nicer

Photo by Heather Barnes on Unsplash

I know we’re all supposed to love chomping merrily on kale etc, but I have to make an effort, I’m afraid. Unlike the friend who claims to ‘crave’ broccoli, I don’t naturally gravitate towards green leafy things. I’m more Team Potato 🥔✊🏼 .

I do like green leafy vegetables - about the healthiest things you can eat - but I would be lying if I said I regularly built meals around them in the way that I might with tomatoes or aubergines or mushrooms. This is a particular failing because I grow rainbow chard, normal spinach, perpetual spinach (which is hardy) and cavolo nero (largely as a cafeteria for caterpillars). Sometimes the greens end up in my floral arrangements, which is nice, or as a present for the goats, which feels badly wasteful even though the goats are thrilled.

Image from here. See also here for an autumnal vegetable bouquet.

For me greens have often been an afterthought, only there out of a last-minute need to feel at least a tiny bit virtuous - meaning I haven’t really done anything to them other than stir-steamed them. This is stir-frying them in a pan with a bit of oil, adding a splash of water, clamping the lid on, letting them wilt, eating them. Obviously this is nicer with e.g. garlic or chilli or ginger, but sometimes I can’t be bothered, meaning the greens are quite boring, meaning I eat them dutifully but without any real pleasure, like a grumpy child.

I have an early copy of Meera Sodha’s new book, Dinner. It is instantly indispensable - my favourite of hers - but I will write about it when it’s actually in the shops, which is 1 August¹. It has provided me with so many new ways of consuming a vast amount of green vegetables at one sitting. One recipe made me eat absolutely industrial quantities of cavolo nero (aka Tuscan kale) and broccoli, all the while thinking ‘This is unbelievably delicious and I’m going to make it all the time’. It’s orecchiette with both of those plus miso butter and chilli oil. Sodha has adapted the recipe from Joshua Fadden’s original in Six Seasons, and to my mind improved it. I can give you the recipe because it’s one of the handful of ones from the book that’s already appeared in her Guardian column.

It is here. Do make it, it’s amazing, plus you’ll feel like Popeye. Also, easy as anything and a perfect weeknight dinner. And while it undeniably is virtuous, unless you’re the sort of person who freaks out about butter (I used butter-butter, not vegan butter), it really doesn’t taste virtuous. It tastes utterly luxurious and like a total treat. The one thing I would say is rinse your food processor/blender really well if you’re going to put it in the dishwasher because the remnants of sauce get everywhere and stick to everything otherwise.

This recipe made me realise that I find plain leafy greens off-puttingly austere, like the John Knox of vegetables, but that when they stop being austere and lean into their more sumptuous side, I really love them. Basically I want a seductive green vegetable and then I’ll eat it for days. So here are some other seductive ways with greens. I use spinach and chard interchangeably, though I remove the rib from the chard (chop it up and cook it first if you like, before adding the leafy bits). Meera Sodha’s book also made me realise that if you want to eat more greens, the trick is to put the greens front and centre, rather than push them to the side. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to understand this - I think it’s to do with not being vegetarian (yet). If you honour the leafy greens, they repay you by being magnificent. If you treat them like an afterthought, they’re a bit boring.

The OG seductive green vegetable is of course creamed spinach, all nutmeggy and luscious, and so delicious with steak since about the mid 20th century. Old recipes use a white sauce, but I don’t like a clompy white sauce in a vegetable context unless it’s leeks with blue cheese (something like this, though maybe not in July, although given the July we’re having in the UK, maybe yes in July, and maybe in front of a roaring fire while wearing an enormous cardigan). Alison Roman’s version dispenses with flour and you can make it with any greens you have to hand. It tastes the opposite of claggy and heavy, but is still the sort of thing you could eat by itself with a spoon.

Or you could make spinach with cream, rather than creamed spinach.

• For two people, chop an onion finely and sweat it in about two tablespoons of butter.

• Meanwhile gently heat about 250ml of double cream in a pan.

• When the onions are cooked, add the warm cream, four handfuls or so of roughly chopped spinach (or other leafy green, e.g. chard, in which case take out the central rib), and stir until wilted.

• You could add cheese, I probably wouldn’t. But I’d certainly grate a bit of nutmeg over and give it all a good stir. This would work with creme fraiche too.

By the way, the easiest way of making sure your blanched spinach is dry before you add it to anything is to drain it as well as you can and then put it in a clean tea towel. Fold the towel over, lift up the sides and then twist for ages (so your tea towel is now the shape of a boiled sweet in a wrapper, like 🍬) until all the liquid runs out and you’re left with a tiny little ball even though you started off with so much spinach it barely fitted in the pan. But it’s now dry and not going to seep pale green water into whatever you’re making. Maybe a super-easy spinach lasagna? Though that recipe saves you the bother of wringing by using frozen.

Chinese recipes for greens arguably make the very best greens. Here is a really simple 4-ingredient way of making them, with endless possible variations, from Omnivore’s Cookbook, which is the most brilliant resource and completely free. Obviously these would be marvellous as part of a meal, but tbh they’re also pretty good on their own with a bowl of rice on a Monday night. I also particularly love her Garlic Green Beans (total time from pot to table, 12 minutes) and these blistered Sichuan dry-fried ones (still only 20 minutes), plus there’s nothing to prevent you from adding in a little bit of crispy-brown minced pork.

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Louise Hagger for The Guardian

Indian and Pakistani greens are almost as good. I like the ones where the greens are really slumped and collapsed and taste rich. Here is Meera Sodha’s recipe for a Pakistani-style spinach and potato curry (which I also made last week). My Pakistani maternal grandmother, who lived with us for years, used to make this all the time. As Sodha notes, the spinach is not perky and bright green but rather cooked to within an inch of its life, so it’s all ferrous and dark and delicious (and oily). Note that this recipe uses frozen spinach.

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Vicky Bhogal’s 2005 book Cooking Like Mummiji, which was way ahead of its time in its focus on the way British Asian people ate at home, has a great recipe for a speeded-up, extremely authentic-tasting old-school saag using tinned spinach (already cooked, so already all ferrous and dark and delicious), which saves time as the traditional method literally takes hours. I am reproducing it here because the book is out of print, which it really shouldn’t be. Anyway, for 4-6 people you want:

• a huge 794g can of puréed palak (like this, or from your local South Asian shop)

• 4 green chillies, finely chopped

• 1/2 a teaspoon salt

• 1/2 cup coarse corn flour

• 1/2 cup vegetable oil

• 1 thinly sliced onion

• 4 finely chopped garlic cloves

• 3 canned whole tomatoes, whizzed in a blender

• 1 teaspoon of freshly grated ginger

• butter to serve

Method:

1. Put the palak in a pan with 1 cup of water. Stir, bring to the boil and simmer for 15 minutes.

2. Add the salt and chillies. Get a handheld blender and whizz everything together in the pan for 2 minutes.

3. When the water has evaporated, leave to cook gently for 10 minutes.

4. Add the corn flour, 1 cup of boiling water and blend again until everything is smooth, thick and even. Turn off the heat.

5. In a frying pan, heat the oil and fry the onion and garlic until they are a deep golden brown (you’re not caramelising anything - you are frying). Lower the heat and wait for 1 minute before adding the tomatoes and ginger. Fry for 5 minutes more, then add the palak pan.

6. Top with a good knob of butter.

7. Eat with rice or parathas, with plain yogurt and your favourite Indian pickle on the side. (She suggests lemon achaar, but you have to make it ten days in advance - 8 lemons, each cut into 12 pieces, 450g fresh ginger, peeled and chopped, 5 tablespoons salt, 1 teaspoon ground turmeric, 1/2 teaspoon red chilli powder, mix everything together and put in a big sterilised jar - a hot cycle in the dishwasher is fine - and leave for 10 days, turning the jar over whenever you remember).

8. If you want paneer in your saag, buy a block from the shops, fry it until it’s golden on all sides and add it in at the end. Personally I would not add it to this particular recipe.

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Slight detour but speaking of cookbooks that were ahead of their time: Shu Han Lee’s Chicken and Rice was another prime example - such a good and useful book about simple Singaporean/Malaysian/Chinese home cooking, one of those books that emerges from the writer being homesick and needing to make the food they’re writing about. This makes for completely different-feeling recipes than those from a food writer chewing their pencil thinking ‘I wonder what sort of book I could write next’. I’m really looking forward to her new one, Agak Agak, which is out now.

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Back to greens:

Here are Jamie Oliver’s Italian-style greens, the work of moments.

Here are Clare Ptak’s wilted greens with bacon and chilli (egg on top = dinner).

Here is a very green quiche, especially for Matt Chorley, who is now on Substack. Matt is an esteemed political journalist turned superstar radio presenter. He’s on Times Radio from 10-1pm for another fortnight before heading off to present a big fat politics show on BBC Radio 5 Live in the autumn. He is very funny and makes even the nerdiest political intricacies intelligible and non-boring. More to the point, he claims to have good hands for quiche pastry (the claim has legs, I think).

Here is Ina Garden’s spinach gratin.

Here is Heidi Swanson’s punchy and delicious broccoli with tofu, chilli and peanuts.

Here are garlicky greens with harissa yogurt and chilli breadcrumbs, so easy and nice for lunch.

Here is vegetable queen Hetty Lui McKinnon’s Substack.

Here is Marc Diacono’s, whose latest book is called Vegetables and is brilliant, as previously noted.

Here is Anna Jones’s 🙌🏼.

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Now I am off to fret all day about England winning the Euros tonight. I have the unshakeable feeling that our new prime minister + a win (on penalties?) = guaranteed sunlit uplands, including literally weather-wise.

Thank you for reading! These fortnightly food posts are free to read. They alternate with short picture posts, which are also free. For everything else, you’ll need a paid subscription. Either way, have a wonderful Sunday, and if you enjoyed this post then do please super kindly hit the ❤️ button - it makes it more visible to non-subscribers. Thank you!

1. Meanwhile do pre-order it - the amount of pre-orders really matter to books, not least because those pre-orders count towards the first week’s sales figures, meaning the book is more likely to chart, meaning it is more likely to stride out into the world rather than totter weakly You know when you see a bestseller chart and sometimes think Eh? Why is that in with a bullet? It’s because the author’s tireless self-promotion has resulted in good numbers of pre-orders. Or because the book is genuinely brilliant, obviously - which it is in Meera Sodha’s case.