A Dozen Ways to Use Up Garden Leafy Greens

My garden produces leaves, lots and lots of leaves. Turnip leaves, radish leaves, chard leaves, cabbage leaves, spinach leaves, nasturtium leaves, lettuce leaves, beet leaves, squash leaves, grape leaves, fig leaves, kale leaves, and Brussel sprout leaves. Not all of these leaves are the intended part of the vegetable for our table. We expect to eat squash, but not the leaves. We expect to eat the Brussel sprouts, not their leaves. Ditto on turnips, beets, grapes, and figs. Leaves we have not only in abundance right now, but we are still waiting for those other parts of the plants to be ready, such as the summer and winter squashes and pumpkins, the figs, and the B sprouts. So, I've been diving deep into cooking various greens using an assortment of cooking techniques. Here are a dozen ways that I've been using our leafy greens. 

One tip I'd like to offer, if you try one way of preparing a green and don't like it, give another way a try. Sometimes the issue is texture. Pureeing a steamed version of the same leaf  will skirt around the objected texture. Or perhaps the flavor is too strong. You can minimize strong flavors with the addition of other more pleasing or bland flavors, such as potatoes, cheese, ham or bacon in a pureed leafy green soup. Or perhaps using just a tiny amount, "hidden" in a highly seasoned dish like chili or a sweet treat like a chocolate cake or brownie. Anyway, these are just some of the ways I've been using our abundance of leafy greens.

• As the main ingredient in salads - kale salad is one of my family's favorite salads. I make an orange sweet and sour dressing to top chopped kale, chopped almonds, and dried cranberries. I also make a fall kale salad with apples, pecans, celery, chopped kale and a sweetened mayonnaise dressing. In addition to using kale specifically for these salads, I also use the stems from various greens, such as turnip, kale and beet stems added to the leafy greens. In the fall, after harvesting the Brussel sprouts, I use the leaves, sliced thin in slaw-type salads.  Our everyday summer salads contain very little lettuce. Wednesday's family-sized salad consisted of beet greens, sorrel, Swiss chard, nasturtium leaves, blossoms and green seeds, chive blossoms, thyme blossoms, and a mere 3 leaves of Romaine lettuce. I try to reserve the lettuce for sandwiches and burgers, as Romaine's crispness makes a difference in those meals while other greens do well in salads.

• Simply sautéed  -- my favorite way to sauté leafy greens is with some sliced onions and minced garlic in reserved ham, bacon, or sausage fat and just a pinch of salt. Growing up, my family ate canned spinach. I was not too fond of nights we had leafy greens as canned spinach. Sautéed fresh greens are nothing like canned greens. The flavor and texture of fresh greens, sautéed, is delightful. We discovered last fall that the leaves left on the Brussel sprouts plants were even more delicious than the actual sprouts. I picked the leaves and sautéed them to have as side dishes to meals. 

• In egg dishes, such as omelets, frittatas, and breakfast casseroles -- I make a lot of frittatas because they just so easy to make as a supper dish and incorporate small bits of this and that. This past week we've had frittatas twice, both times with an assortment of garden leafy greens imbedded. What makes frittatas so particularly easy in our house is that the handle of our old skillet (from my husband's childhood home many, many years ago) broke off a couple of years ago. At first, I was going to replace the handle with one ordered from Amazon. However, a price of $15 put me off from that idea. I have been checking Goodwill and Value Village for a replacement skillet or a pot/pan with a handle that I could scavenge. So far, nothing yet. Until then, I'll continue using this skillet without the handle as our frittata pan. Why would a handle-less skillet be so great for frittatas, you wonder? I begin the frittata in the skillet on the stove then transfer it to the oven to finish setting the eggs. No handle means my skillet can tolerate higher temperatures. How do I move my handle-less skillet from the stove to the oven, you follow up? I use potholders to grab the skillet by both sides. If I had a camping handle (sort of a clamping device), that would also work with a handle-less pot or pan.  You can also hide a bit of leafy greens added to breakfast casseroles. I shred the greens and stir into the egg mixture. Once the casserole is topped with cheese, the greens go unnoticed.

• Over baked potatoes. Chopped and sautéed or steamed greens tossed with a cheese sauce to serve over baked potatoes. My kids all grew up eating kale in cheese sauce on a baked potato, then sprinkled with bacon bits. I still get requests to make this simple supper dish.

• Pureed to use in soup -- if your leafy greens are on the tough or stringy side, chopping well, steaming, then pureeing will deal with that unpleasant texture of aging leaves. Pureeing is also a good way to hide purchased leafy greens (like those on a bundle of radishes) that have wilted and no longer look appealing. Cream of "green" with cheese and potato soup is delicious and not at all a burden to have for lunch or supper.

• Pureed as a pasta topping -- with garlic, olive oil, and Parmesan cheese -- this is a favorite of my family. Using radish or turnip leaves, I chop them, steam in the microwave, then puree the leaves with some garlic, olive oil and Parmesan cheese. I toss cooked pasta with the resulting thick sauce. The vibrant color and fresh taste is very summer-like to me. 

• Pesto -- Much like the above pasta sauce using garden greens, pesto to have as a cold spread on a sandwich or as a dip for vegetables or pita chips can be made with leafy greens, such as radish leaves. Here's a recipe by David Lebovitz that's economical in that it calls for almond in place of the usual, pricey pine nuts to puree with radish leaves, garlic, olive oil, and Parmesan.

• Pureed to hide in chocolate cakes, muffins and brownies, 1 or 2 tablespoons at a time. Arugula is my favorite garden green to puree and add to chocolate desserts. Just a spoonful and it oddly tastes a bit like I've added peanuts to the batter.

• Pureed to hide in traditional spaghetti sauce, just a tablespoon or two. This trick also works in chili. Because both red pasta sauce and chili are highly flavored and dark in color, I can get away with the stronger flavored greens, such as turnip greens, collards, and kale.

• Dehydrated and powdered to use in soups, sauces, dips, or "green" rice at a later time.

• In smoothies, just a few leaves at a time. I used about 5 medium-sized spinach leaves in a berry and banana smoothie the other day. Aside from the slightly darker color, the leaves were undetectable.

• Wrap sandwiches. Larger leaves can be used as wrappers for wrap sandwiches. For maximum flexibility, blanch the leaves, one at a time, in a pot of boiling water for 20 seconds. Swiss chard, collard leaves, and large kale leaves all work well as wrappers. Fill with chopped or shredded veggies, green onions, chopped fresh herbs, tofu, leftover cooked chicken or turkey, shredded cheese, chopped olives, or whatever else you can think of. Put a large dollop of the filling ingredients onto a blanched leaf, then roll up like a burrito. Add a dipping sauce, such as a Thai-inspired peanut sauce. 

Bon Appetit!

Reclaiming Some of Our Wastewater to Use in the Garden

If you've never spent a lot of time in the Seattle area, you may think that it rains here all of the time. Seattle is a rather rainy place. But we do get our share of dry spells, particularly in summer. From around the middle of June through mid-September, most years find us high and dry for weeks on end. In fact, some towns in my area suggest that folks plant drought resistant landscapes, here, where it rains and rains and rains.

We do our part and avoid watering the lawns in summer. We also keep a large swath of our property in woods. If a plant or tree can't take a dry summer, it just doesn't make it in the woods. But our gardens and orchards do need constant watering in summer.

I begin each summer with two full rain barrels, with a combined capacity of 110 gallons. These rain barrels catch the spring rain from our roof during storms. They are full and overflowing when I am beginning to set plants out into my garden each year. Most years, we get enough refill rain to keep those barrels topped off until about the 3rd week of June. At that point, what I have in the barrels is about all I'll have for the rest of summer. Any summer rainfall we get seems to get sucked up by the bone dry cedar shingles, with only a small trickle left to run off and into the gutters before dripping into the barrels.

Knowing that this rain water is limited for our active growing season, I water very judiciously. Even so, by early July, my rain barrels are about empty. For the hottest months of the year, I have to rely on municipal water to keep my gardens growing.

You would think living in a place with a reputation for lots of rainfall that we'd have low water bills. I wish that were so. It's not only the water and delivery that accounts for our high water bills. The bulk of the cost, I believe, is for the wastewater treatment for all of that water that goes down the drains, which is calculated for each household based on the amount of water used. So, I try super hard in summer to use as little extra water outdoors as possible.

This year, as I was using up the rain barrel water, I began thinking that we should save the "cleaner" used kitchen water and pour it into the emptying rain barrel. In years past, I've set the watering can on the deck just outside the kitchen door. It was a bit of a hassle pouring the used water into the small opening of the watering can, leaving a lot on the deck floor and having a limited capacity (2.5 gallon can) to hold water for the next watering. It was once in spring that I began thinking how nice it would be to have a spare rain barrel that I could put on the deck next to the kitchen, so I could pour the used kitchen water directly into that nearby rain barrel and save it until needed. Rain barrels are pricey, however. Then I thought, what if I had a larger container for collecting used water on the deck, then transferred that water into the rain barrel a few gallons at a time. I remembered the stack of 5-gallon buckets in the garage and grabbed one and put it on the deck just outside the kitchen door. I also pulled a plastic dishpan out of the pantry and placed it in the kitchen sink. We now rinse (whether that be hands, vegetables, or pots/pans) over this plastic tub and transfer that saved water to the 5-gallon bucket as it fills. Then once the 5-gallon bucket is about 3/4 full, I take that down the steps to the rain barrel next to the garden. The rain barrel has a screen on top, filtering out any vegetable debris that remains in the rinse water. I find I'm emptying the 5-gallon bucket into the rain barrel 2 to 4 times per day.

Anyway, my post today is about more than just saving water. It's about what I find I need to do to make new habits stick. I was thinking about making new habits and why we sometimes can't keep them. Every summer I've tried to save some of the used kitchen water for watering our vegetables. One or more of the steps in making a new habit are sometimes inconvenient or difficult to perform. I mentioned some of the problems I had with saving water in a watering can on the deck. It had a small opening on the top, meaning I spilled a lot of the water I was trying to save. The watering can didn't hold enough water to make much of a dent in our water usage, just a mere 2.5 gallons. If I had the time to drop everything and go water a portion of the garden with the watering can every time it filled up, perhaps capacity wouldn't have been such an obstacle. But for me, it really was. I wanted to have larger amounts of water on hand for my daily watering chore. The 5-gallon bucket on the deck was just the thing I needed to make saving the water both more convenient and help me better achieve my water-saving goals. 

I've been amazed by how much rinse water we actually save each day. We are reclaiming between 10 and 15 gallons of mostly clean water each day. (I rinse my hands a lot when cooking and baking. In addition, garden produce is much dirtier than purchased produce.) We're careful to only pour mostly clean water into the barrel, as we don't want bad odors or bacteria to develop. Some of the water that is not saved and stored in the rain barrels is still clean enough to dump on shrubs and trees by carrying the washpan directly out to a tree. So in fact, we're saving more than 10 gallons of water per day.

So far this seems to be working for me. I eliminated some of the aspects that put me off from sticking with this new habit. Such a little change -- using one of our larger buckets to collect the water before dumping into the emptying rain barrel. Time will tell if I stick with this water saving this year.

Have you encountered challenges when forming new habits? How did you overcome those challenges? What ways did you need to rethink your new process?