Easy and delicious cooked greens
After
letting the plants take up space in our garden for four years, I've
finally found a use for chives. Let me back up, though, and tell
you about our new favorite greens "recipe." I put
"recipe" in quotes because something this simple doesn't really seem
like cooking, but the taste is surprisingly complex:
- About three quarts of loosely packed leafy greens
- About a pint of chicory leaves
- About half a cup of Egyptian onion leaves
- A healthy dash of balsamic vinegar
- A slightly less healthy dash of peanut oil
Turn
the heat on high and stir until the leaves are just barely cooked (a
few scant minutes.) The greens cook down to make just enough to
serve two. Not elegant but definitely delicious!
Now, back to those
chives. Egyptian onions make an appearance on our plates daily
for much of the year, but at the beginning of May, the plants begin to
put up their fruiting stalks. At that point, the onion leaves
turn thicker and lose a lot of their prime flavor, so I needed to find
a replacement for my most-used herb. That's when I remembered
that normal people cook with chives the way I cook with Egyptian
onions, and 
sure enough, chives made a
pretty good substitute in the recipe above. Chive leaves seem to
lose their flavor less when they're in bloom, even though I think the
leaves don't taste as good as Egyptian onion leaves during the rest of
the year.
In case you're wondering
why I weeded and mulched chives for so long without eating them, the
answer is --- pollinators! Our halictid
bees, especially,
adore the flowers of chives, and I've seen several other pollinators
visiting from time to time. And, yes, they're pretty.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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