Today I tried the recipe for "Braised Winter Greens" in the Jan/Feb 2009 edition of Cook's Illustrated. It promised to be not the soupy "pot likker" mess that has never appealed to me. I started off with 24 oz of collard greens. Once I removed the ribs, we were down to about 14 oz. So here's my calorie count:

If I divide that up into four servings, that comes to 108 calories per serving.

I have to say that this is the best recipe for greens I've ever had. The texture was fine. The original recipe called for some red pepper. I actually used tepines, which was wonderful.

2020-03-17: I decided to try some kale tonight using that old recipe.

Ingredients

I started off with the onions in olive oil till they softened. Added the garlic till fragrant. Added 1/4 cup of brocolli stock (which I had left over from a previous meal), as much of the kale as the pan could hold and covered it with a lid till it wilted. Mixed it up. Added the rest of the cale, plus red pepper, black pepper and salt. Twice more I added 1/4 cup of brocolli stock when I thought it was getting too dry. Braised with the lid on till it seemed done.

The result? Very tasty.

As an ingredient for a recipe the other day, I picked up shan yao, which is a member of the yam family. Pretty scary looking, huh? What's scarier is that when you peel it, it develops vile white mucilaginous strings, and it becomes as slippery as a greased pig in a tub of lard. Why the heck am I cooking with this grotesque vegetable? Well, I was supposed to buy dried shan yao, but the closest Asian store only had the raw item. I only needed a half cup of the raw, so I was left with this huge tuber that I paid too much money for. I just can't throw it out. All my Scottish ancestors would rise from their graves and curse me for a spendthrift. I searched the web up and down for recipes that use it, but the only ones I could find involved lots of other carbs, which just won't fly with my current food Nazi diet, or they were in soups, which are notoriously hard to count for calories unless they are a homogenous purée, which these soups weren't. One web page suggested they be cooked like potatoes. With that clue I decided to apply my brother-in-law's approach to making oven-baked potatoes.

Here are the instructions to duplicate what I did.

Baked shan yao

1. Pre-heat oven to 400°.
2. Wash and peel the tuber.
3. Slice it in half lengthwise, and then slice each resulting half lengthwise as well.
4. Cross cut the tuber into pieces about 3/8" thick. You'll end up with a bunch of wedge-shaped chunks
5. Lightly oil a foil-lined baking pan. Distribute the chunks on it. Sprinkle with salt and pepper to taste. Sprinkle the left side of the pan with garlic powder, and the right side with chile powder. (I like the varying tastes.)
6. Place in oven for 40 minutes. Remove and serve.

To my great pleasure, the resulting wedges tasted good. They weren't slimy at all. The insides weren't quite as dry and flaky, say, as Russet potatoes would have been, which makes sense since the tuber seems slightly moister than a standard potato, but again the texture was perfectly pleasant.

The Wikipedia article on shan yao states that it has 65 kilocalories per 100 grams of raw tuber, which makes it somewhat less calorically dense than Russets, thus it's fine for occasionally consumption in moderation.

I just got done making Cauliflower-Potato Mash from "The Garden of Eating." Holy cow, but it's tasty. Although I'm a fan of cauliflower, I was the teensiest bit skeptical of the recipe, but I think even my niece and nephew would eat it. I didn't have any nutmeg handy, so I substituted allspice instead, which worked wonderfully.

The recipe made 4.5 cups of mash, so that makes 163 calories per 1 cup serving. That's perfectly fine for a comfort food dish.

Hm. Now I've opened up a can of coconut milk and only used 1/4 of it. That leads me to my next entry: improvised curried lentils.

I've been wanting to add dark greens to my diet since they are so healthy. I tried to use some recipes from "The Garden of Eating…" but I didn't much care for them. The book suggested that they were almost indigestible without cooking. Last night I decided to try them just raw. I liked 'em. They had a slightly bitter taste, which is something I rather like these days. Chopped up in a bowl with some flax seed oil and some balsamic vinegar, it was pretty good. Now I'll have to try kale the same way.

A week or two ago I was at the farmers market and spotted a vegetable I had never seen before; turns out that it's called Serpent of Sicily. I bought one on the spot out of culinary curiosity. The woman at the booth was kind enough to hand out a printed recipe for cooking the vegetable, which today I made. The recipe is simplicity itself, and it was home-cooked tasty.

Procedure

1. Cook one onion in a small amount of water. Use a red onion and the broth turns out a rose color.
2. Skin the gourd and cut into slices.
3. Once the onion i scooked, add the gourd, one chopped tomato, and a touch of salt.
4. Cover and cook
5. Serve with a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil, crunchy bread, and shaved baked ricotta,

The longer it cooks, the richer the flavor.

I think the one I bought was just a bit too big: parts of it were getting woody, and some of the seeds were too tough to chew. Next time I won't buy one longer than two feet or thicker than two inches.