Cooking with Greens: Gumbo Z'herbes

We get a lot of greens from our gardens on Brangus Lane and in Houston, and in Houston we also belong to a community-supported agriculture, or CSA. Every week we pick up our share of vegetables, and this time of year, greens are an important part of the harvest.  You know that greens are very good for you. The magnesium in them helps your mitochondria to work. The iron is good for your blood. The calcium is good for your bones. But sometimes it seems impossible to use all these greens! If only you could somehow sort of reduce them to a flavorful, nutritious essence...

Enter gumbo z'herbes, a concentrated, flavorful essence of greens. I first heard of this in a macrobiotic cooking class in Boston, of all places, where a classmate from Louisiana talked about it. The macrobiotic version, truth be told, was not all that great:  it was just chopped greens simmered in some water, maybe with an onion. I suspected that there was more to the original version.

Years later I saw a recipe for gumbo z'herbes in Gourmet magazine. The recipe I'm using today is adapted from the Gourmet recipe.  This version seems more authentic, as it calls for  ham hocks cooked for an hour to make a flavorful stock to cook the greens in. I also found a recipe in New Orleans Gumbos and Soups, by Kit Wohl.  The recipe in that book comes from a restaurant called Dooky Chase's, which I'd love to visit. This recipe has you boil the greens for thirty minutes, strain them, make a meat broth with a LOT of meat, and then a roux-thickened broth, to which you add the chopped greens and meat.  This recipe is probably even more authentic than the Gourmet recipe, but I prefer to cook my greens for a shorter period of time to preserve their vitamins and bright green color.

(Speaking of bright, green color: one thing that I've noticed about cooking with greens is that if you parboil the leaves whole for about 3-5 minutes, cool them, chop them finely, and then store the chopped, lightly-cooked greens in a bowl in the refrigerator, you will use them more in your everyday cooking. They are already prepped, and they look so good and colorful! You can simply saute these lightly-cooked greens in olive oil or butter, maybe with a sauteed onion, or add them to soups and stews at the end of the cooking. They could be folded into an omelet, a souffle batter, or a sauce.)

The basic idea for gumbo z'herbes is that you make a kind of thin soul food/cracker version of sauce veloute for its base, to which you add the cooked greens and meat. A classic French sauce veloute is a white sauce made with a fish or chicken broth stirred into a roux made with butter and flour. But in the South, we make our roux with pork fat of some kind, from bacon or lard or sausage, and our broth is made from ham hocks. The pig ruled Southern cuisine for most of our history.

(There is also a classic French sauce called sauce bechamel, where milk is added to the butter and flour roux instead of broth. In the South, we call it sawmill gravy, and again, the roux is made of fat rendered from bacon or sausage.)

So here's my adapted, somewhat simplified, somewhat brighter-green gumbo z'herbes recipe.

2 lbs greens (I used mustard greens and sweet potato greens)
1/2 lb bacon or 1# ham hock
2 small habanero peppers
1 chopped onion
2 garlic cloves
1 bell pepper chopped
2 T butter or bacon fat
2 T flour

Bring 2 quarts of water to boil in a large pot. Put the greens in the pot, one bunch at a time. You may have to cook the greens in three batches to fit the bunches in the pot. Don't chop the greens before cooking: they have more flavor if they're boiled whole. Parboil each bunch of greens for about five minutes, then scoop the greens out and put them in a colander to cool. When they are cool, chop them.

When all the greens are cooked, put the bacon or ham hock and habaneros in the cooking water and simmer for one hour. Strain. Chop the bacon, and take the meat off the ham hock, and set aside.

Cook the onions, pepper, and garlic in the butter in a pot for about five minutes. Add the flour and cook, stirring, for 2-3 minutes. Add the broth in a slow stream, stirring constantly. It will begin to thicken. This is your cracker sauce veloute. Add the chopped greens and bacon. Simmer, uncovered, for about eight minutes. Season to taste with salt and vinegar.

You can puree the soup with an immersible blender after cooking if you want it to be really smooth and like essence de greens.

Garnish it with cream, sour cream, Tabasco sauce, and a side of sausage. You can serve it over rice or with cornbread.

Asian Persimmons

I don't really have a favorite food of all time, one that I would request on death row at my last meal. I like seasonal, local food, from my own terroir if possible, and that varies depending on the time of year. In summer, it's my own favorite cherry tomatoes; in winter, it's my own favorite kale.

Right now I'm in Houston, which is not my own terroir, but I still buy locally-grown food at the farmer's market.  Right now what I really, really like is persimmons. I like them everywhere, even when I'm in Tennessee, but in Tennessee I eat wild persimmons that I find on the ground, usually on the road, and sort of warmed by the road and maybe smushed by a car. Sometimes they have a little grit from the road in them. They have a lot of seeds, and I save the seeds and scatter them around my farm, or plant them in a row in the garden hoping to grow a hardy persimmon seedling.

In Houston you can buy locally-grown Asian persimmons. These are quite a bit bigger than the wild native persimmons, and they have only one or two seeds per fruit. Some fruits have no seeds at all! They are a beautiful orange color before they are ripe, and they are rather hard at first, but then they soften and turn brownish, and this is when you eat them. The variety that I bought at the farmer's market did not have much of the astringency of the wild American persimmon, but apparently some of the Asian types are more astringent than others.

The other day on one of my walks around the neighborhood, I saw a neighbor's tree just loaded with these Asian persimmons. None of them were on the ground. I think you pick them here while they are still unripe, and then you ripen, or "blett" them, in the house. That also prevents possums from dining on them before you can get them.

Urban Harvest in Houston sells Asian persimmon trees at their annual fruit tree sale in late January, and maybe I will get one this year. They certainly seem to thrive here. However, I think it would likely be too cold for them on Brangus Lane: they can't take temperatures below zero. Maybe in the near future, though, as the climate warms, we will be able to grow Asian persimmons in the Upper Cumberland.

Pot-au-Feu; National Blog Posting Month

Apparently November is NaBloPoMo, or something like that. The people at BlogHer challenge us bloggers to write in our blog every day, and today we're supposed to write about what we like the most about writing. That is, writing in our blogs, presumably.

The thing I like about it is that nobody edits me. This still seems so amazing to me, that I can write whatever I want to and publish it to the whole world, for free, instantly, with nobody telling me I can't or I shan't, as Dr Seuss would say. It may be the case that hardly anybody reads it. I don't care. It's out there, and it's published. I wonder if the first people to get printing presses felt this excited and liberated about their new-found power to wield a weapon of mass communication!  Probably. But you still needed ink, and paper, and now we don't. And there's no printer to tell us he won't publish our broadside. The Gutenberg revolution fomented all sorts of other revolutions; may our information revolution foster more revolutions. Maybe it already has.

Now that that's out of the way, I can get back to business. Last night I made something really primal: pot-au-feu. Like creme fraiche, it sounds fancy and French. It is French, but it's just peasant food. What you do is you buy some cheap cuts of tough meat and some bones. This won't set you back much. Get some marrow bones too. I got a piece of brisket, some "soup" bones, some beef short ribs, and some marrow bones. I used a recipe from the March 2008 issue of Gourmet as a starting point. IT can be found here.

You roast the bones (except the marrow bones) and meat in the oven for an hour. They turn all nice and brown and smell wonderful. Also you put an onion and a carrot in the roasting pan to roast with the meat.

Then you put the roasted bones and vegetables in a big soup pot and boil for three hours. It sounds like a lot of time, but this makes the broth all beefy and dark and wonderful. You can add some herbs like bay leaf, peppercorns, thyme, and parsley.

Now for the marrow bones. Put them in a saucepan standing up. Pour some of your wonderful broth over them to cover. Boil for fifteen to twenty minutes, until the marrow is soft.  Remove the marrow bones from the broth and keep them warm till supper time, at which point you will scoop out the marrow and eat it, either in your bowl or on a piece of toast. This is the part that's really primal.

(The broth you cooked the marrow bones in will be cloudy. If this doesn't bother you, keep it for another use. If it does bother you, feed it to a dog.)
Now simmer whatever vegetables you have on hand in the beautiful clear brown beef broth. When you're ready to eat, cut the meat off the bones, slice the brisket, put the meat and vegetables in a bowl, and ladle the broth over. Garnish with sour cream and mustard and horseradish.

Tools of the Trade

You don't need to spend a lot of money to get involved in canning. Just retrofit a big stockpot and away you go! There are one or two inexpensive tools, though, that make the job a lot easier. Here's a little video about that.

Row Covers for Fall

I have been using spun-bonded row covers for years on my fall garden. They keep greens and root crops fresh deep into the winter, even under snow. This year I decided to suspend them on hoops rather than lay them directly on the greens, for better air circulation. I made two kinds of hoops: plastic and wire. In this video you can see how I made the hoop houses or low tunnels for the row covers. The plastic tubing hoops are sturdier, but they are more expensive to make than the wire hoops.

Kiwi-Apple Chutney; Canning

I got some locally grown hardy kiwis from a friend with a large hardy kiwi vine, and I decided to make some chutney with the kiwis and some Arkansas Black apples I got from another local grower. I adapted the recipe below from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving.

It's okay to adapt ingredients and spices a little bit from a canning recipe, but you can't alter the amount of vinegar in the recipe: that determines the acidity of the batch, and the acidity has to be sufficient to make the recipe safe to can in a boiling water bath. So, I kept the amount of vinegar the same and just altered the ratio of kiwis to apples, and I substituted some balsamic vinegar and white vinegar for the cider vinegar called for in the recipe. (Most vinegar has about the same amount of acidity.) I also substituted chopped butternut squash for the raisins, because I didn't have any raisins. I figured the butternut squash would add some sweetness, as the raisins would have.

Here's what I ended up using. This recipe made five half-pint jars of chutney.

4 cups of chopped kiwis
5 cups of peeled, cored, diced apples
1 1/2 cup chopped onions
3/4 cup white vinegar
3/4 cup balsamic vinegar
1 1/2 cup sugar
3/4 cup dark brown sugar
1/2 cup peeled diced butternut squash
1 large clove of elephant garlic
1 teaspoon peeled diced fresh gingerroot
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp mustard seeds
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp ground allspice
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp black pepper

Combine the kiwi, apple, onions, vinegar, sugar, brown sugar, squash, garlic and gingerroot. Bring to a boil and simmer for thirty minutes. Add the spices, and simmer another ten minutes.

Sterilize the jars and lids. Ladle the chutney into the jars, leaving a 1/4 inch clearance. Wipe the rim with a wet napkin. Put the lids and bands on the jars and place them in the canning kettle. Process for ten minutes at a rolling boil.

Remove the jars and cool on the counter. Check to see that they all sealed.

Soup Cooked in a Pumpkin

Ever since I saw an article in Martha Stewart Living years ago about gilded pumpkins containing soup, I've wanted to make a pumpkin with soup inside, minus the gilding, which just seems de trop. It turns out that Chef Marian, of The Victory Garden Cookbook, had a recipe all along in the chapter on pumpkins. Today I tried it, with an adorable small pumpkin that was given to me by a friend. It was grown by the farmers who run her community supported agriculture share.

It turned out to be quite easy to cook soup in a pumpkin. I made a little video about it. The pumpkin is a Tan Cheese pumpkin, and it's very tasty. You start out by cutting a top out of the pumpkin and scraping the seeds out, just as you do to carve a pumpkin for Halloween. You oil the inside of the pumpkin and bake it in the oven, empty, with the lid on, for 20 minutes at 400 degrees. Then you take it out, add a little rice and sauteed vegetables to the inside of the pumpkin, plus chicken broth to fill the pumpkin, replace the top, and roast again for 45 minutes to an hour, with the soup inside.