Vegetarian Southern Food

Our pal Mark was in the US last week, and because he is currently not eating meat (long story), I got to cook some vegetarian food. It was fun. I think it's been about five years since I gave up my 12-year vegetarian spell.

Because Mark lives in Kyoto but is from around here, I wanted to make him some Southern food. These are lima beans, cooked very simply overnight in a crockpot, with olive oil and salt added in the last several hours. I experimented with the mustard greens, sauteeing a few chunks of red miso paste in some olive oil to see if I could get a meaty, salty fullness for a base the same way I would from a ham hock or some bacon. It was delicious and did have a full taste and a brownish pot liquor, but I don't know that it was that brilliant.

The grits were fermented. I interviewed Glenn from Anson Mills several months ago, and he told me that during the summer one can pre-soak grits at room temperature and get what he called "pinpoint ferment," which completely changes their taste and texture. I could never find any other information on the phenomenon, but when I soaked some grits Glenn had ground coarsely from John Haulk corn, they did indeed ferment rather quickly. It was a sweet, mild ferment, never sour, and after I let them do that overnight I rinsed them thoroughly and cooked them like normal: 1.5 or so hours on the stove, gently, with salt and butter and a little cream at the end. The fermented flavor was strong, but sweet and corny and smooth. Very strange. Lawson and Mark loved it, too, although they'd never heard of it, either.

Bitter and Sweet, All Green

Sauteed red dandelion greens with just a few drops of red wine vinegar:

Unscripted zucchini soup made with garden zucchini, sweet onions, fresh thyme, a touch of rosemary, parsley, garlic, stock from a smoked chicken, buttermilk, and lots of black pepper:

Together they were magical. The dandelions were ultra-bitter, and the soup quite sweet. Very nice.

We also had steamed garden okra (note the purple pods in with the green this year) and homemade biscuits. No meat, no heavy protein anything -- just lots of green food.

Kale, Potato, and White Bean Soup II: An Actual Recipe

I've made this soup several times since I first posted about it, so I thought I'd post the recipe. It's easy, quick for a hearty soup, and healthy (especially if, like me, you think a little bit of pork fat will probably be found someday to have secret health benefits).

Today a friend brought me three bunches of collards from her father's winter garden. The first bunch I cooked quite plainly in olive oil and seasoned with salt, dried red pepper, and vinegar, but perhaps another bunch will make its way into this soup.

In a Dutch oven, cook 4 strips of meaty bacon cut into smaller squares with scissors. Remove and drain on paper towels. Pour off all but 1 tablespoon of bacon fat.

Add 1 tablespoon olive oil. Saute 1 or 2 chopped onions until translucent.

Add 1/2 cup white wine or 1/4 cup vermouth, scraping up any browned onion and bacon bits.

Add and bring to simmer:
-2 potatoes, cubed
-1 large can cannellini beans, with goo
-a few big sprigs fresh thyme
-2 bay leaves
-chicken stock to cover (stock from a smoked turkey is also perfect)
-salt and pepper

When soup is simmering, add bit by bit, stirring as it cooks down:
-1 medium bunch kale, collards, or other greens, sliced

Simmer for 30 to 45 minutes, until soup is thick and whitened. Stir in 1 teaspoon lemon zest. Add bacon back in and serve.

Slow Collards

It occurs to me that you might not yet have cooked collards the really long, slow, traditional way, Mom. The collards Dad has started growing are so tender, and our family isn't much for cooking vegetables for half a day. And besides, I didn't want to scare you the first few times I made collard greens for you, because Southern food was so foreign to us. But I think you should try it. I took a bunch of pictures on Sunday, so here's a pictorial guide.

I weighed the bunch of collards I bought before I left the store: 3.5 pounds. It was a large, compact bunch, and probably yielded 8 side-dish-sized servings.

I have made greens that were really tasty but totally ruined by gritty dirt. So you have to do exactly what all the recipes say: fill a sink or a giant bowl (or a cooler, as I discovered at Thanksgiving) with water, swish the greens around, and let them sit there for 10 or more minutes until the dirt has fallen to the bottom. Change the water once or twice. Collards seem less dirty in general than turnip and mustard greens, which you should wash even more thoroughly.

Don't dry the collards at all -- you're just going to add more water. Take several leaves at a time, roll or bunch them up a bit, and cut crosswise, across the stem. I don't discard much of the stalk -- only the thickest bit at the base. It all gets very tender and tasty, so why waste it?

You will need some kind of cured pork product. I probably wouldn't have chosen the chemical wonderland pictured here, but Lawson was good enough to do our Thanksgiving shopping and decided we needed 10 pounds of artificially flavored pork neckbones, so I will not complain. Ham hocks work well, too. Probably roasted pork bones of any sort would also be okay.

A closeup, perhaps?

I don't know what that is, either. I poked it, and it was flexible.

Next, get a big pot. The bigger it is, the less time you have to spend waiting for the collards to cook down so you can stuff more in the pot. You will probably still have to spend a while doing so...maybe 15 extremely unstrenuous minutes.

Turn the heat on to medium-high and put the pork in the pot. Begin adding collards.

This is still just the one bunch I started with. It took about 10 minutes to get it all in. I used this strangely shaped wooden spoon thing that Lawson picked up at a yard sale to stir and prod.

Once all the collards are in, add water to bring the level up to 4 or 5 inches. Some recipes call for more...according to a family cookbook, Lawson's aunt covered hers entirely with water which she then discarded (sacrilege!) but this is a good start. You may need to add more later. Slow collards should end up with plenty of what is usually called potlikker, a greenish vitaminy broth that is, for me, almost the entire point of slow collards.

Then simmer the whole thing, lid slightly vented, for 3 to 6 hours, stirring maybe every 30 minutes. The pork should cook down and the greens become first darker green then less green. Add more water if needed.

Here are the collards after about two hours. They've reduced but are still darker green and not yet completely tender. These took another hour and a half.

When they're finished cooking, salt the collards to taste -- you shouldn't need much if the pork was cured. Then add a few teaspoons or more of hot pepper vinegar. Ideally you have a jar of pickled chiles of some sort and can just use some of the juice. If not, maybe cider vinegar and Texas Pete?

And here they are, all finished and delicious, with plenty of potlikker and a little of the meat that fell off the neckbone. Do not be dubious, even if you prefer vegetables that aren't overcooked...these are a special case. Lawson eats them cold out of the refrigerator for dessert -- they're that good.

Planned Side Dishes

It's important to plan over a healthy breakfast.

Lawson and I are assigned the side dishes for his big family Thanksgiving again. We are going to be much less ambitious than in years past, so I am feeling pretty good about it all. Here's what we're making:

- Collards, traditional Southern style. This involves a ham hock and several hours of simmering with plenty of water.

- Green beans, traditional Southern style. This involves a smoked turkey neck and several hours of simmering with plenty of water. Are you getting all this?

- Spinach-rice. Because the turkey is smoked, it isn't stuffed, and every year Lawson pores over stuffing recipes and spends hours making it and nobody eats very much. His stuffing is good, but I don't think it's a stuffing-eating family. So we're going with rice and spinach this year.

- Macaroni and cheese, which I have noted in the past is the weirdest of the traditional Southern Thanksgiving foods. We will be using the absurd Macaroni and Cheese Supreme recipe of the illustrious David Wade, TV chef and object of my scholarly and acquisitional interest. I can't wait. The recipe includes 2 cups of sour cream. It will clog arteries from 8 yards away.

- Cranberry sauce. I adore the extremely tart raw cranberry-orange relish we make every year with the hand-cranked meat grinder, but I'm going to try plain cooked cranberry sauce this year to see how it goes over.

- I may make some gingerbread.

So, all in all, it should be pretty low key. The only bad part is that we have to procure all our groceries tonight, along with the rest of the city.

Flu Shot Soup

Lawson got a flu shot Friday, which always makes him feel crummy and sleepy and flulike a day or two afterward. That's not supposed to happen, according to what I've read, since the virus in the vaccine is dead, but he says it always does, so whatever.

Anyway, yesterday he felt bad and I invented this soup. It's somewhere in between chicken-noodle soup and Nina Simonds' cinnamon beef noodles. And it's so much healthier and more satisfying than regular chicken-noodle soup.

We had a carcass left over from last week, when I roasted a whole chicken. I made a stock using the carcass, an onion, a few carrots, and a number of turnip stalks. I threw in a few bay leaves but otherwise kept it pretty unseasoned because I didn't know at that point what I was going to make.

After the stock had simmered for hours and was good and rich and drained and cooling off in the refrigerator, I sauteed a chopped onion, a big clove of garlic, a few chopped carrots, and a potato. I added a little sherry, then some chopped turnip greens (maybe half of a medium bunch -- not so much that the soup was overwhelmed). I then seasoned the soup with salt, star anise, cinnamon, and coriander and simmered everything for about 35 minutes, until the potato was soft. I took out the star anise and added some shredded chicken left over from the roasting -- about one breast and one leg's worth -- and a cup of pasta stars, and let it simmer for 10 minutes more. All it needed then was black pepper.

Stock is just not very pretty.

Collards

This is my favorite way to eat collard greens: cut into strips, with the ribs chopped up small, and sauteed in the fat from one or two pieces of bacon. Garlic and a dried chile are optional. It's halfway in between the traditional ham-hock-and-eighteen-hours recipe and the lighter stir frying in olive oil...both of which I write about in a November piece for the Free Times which will be published the week after Thanksgiving.

Oh, man, I love collards.

Spiced Lamb Meatballs and Yellow Chard

It was hard to get a pretty picture of this meal, but boy did it taste good. I bought ground lamb and made a Claudia Roden recipe in which the lamb was mixed with allspice, cumin, and coriander, and then formed into meatballs. I sauteed the meatballs with some onions and garlic, and added tomato paste to make the whole thing into a stew. We ate it over rice. It was a great recipe for a busy night in which I wandered in and out of the kitchen a lot -- sort of time-consuming, but easy and spread out.

The chard was actually the tops of some golden beets I bought over the weekend. It looked kind of tough, but ended up being tender and really mild -- Lawson said it tasted like turnip greens, and he was right. I sauteed the stems in olive oil first, then added the leaves and some red chile and garlic and a bit too much salt.

I'll be going on about greens a lot over the next several days, as I am working on a piece about collards for the Free Times. I even interviewed a local organic farmer yesterday about them. Oh, I love collards.