Eat your greens!
Eat your greens!
Au milieu de l'hiver, j'apprenais enfin qu'il y avait en moi un été invincible.
We’ve made it through the bleakness of January! As we venture ahead into this year and through the winter months, I’m not yet ready for spring’s arrival, but I am ready for some spring flavors. I’ve been pining for asparagus and ramps and strawberries, but the produce of these months is squash, potatoes, and beans. Don’t get me wrong, soups are amazing, and I’ve been experimenting with beans this year much more than ever before. But lately, I’ve found myself craving greens! A side of greens with a hearty winter dish is like a day of sunshine after 15 days of clouds. (Thanks to New York City for the simile.)
This newsletter is dedicated to the ways I’ve been incorporating greens and sides into my recipes, for that pop of freshness we can all use in February. The top greens in my life right now have been: cabbage, spinach, arugula, and leeks.
I’ve really been enjoying raw, dressed cabbage alongside my meals lately! It makes a perfect bed for tofu katsu, or even as a topper for noodles or stir fry. My new favorite thing to make is what I call “sweet and sour cabbage:” dress thinly sliced, raw cabbage with a mixture of sesame oil, rice vinegar, dijon mustard, and a pinch of sugar. (Recipe is detailed below!) Adding a side of crunchy cabbage is a great way to add flavor, freshness, and crunch to soft noodles or rice. Plus, cabbage can be eaten raw or cooked, and keeps quite well in the fridge, so there’s a myriad of possibilities for this leafy veg! (For more opining on cabbage, check out my old newsletter on cooking for yourself to find joy, here. And a tip: the gateway recipe for me becoming obsessed with cabbage was Hetty McKinnon’s Caramelized Cabbage and Walnut Pasta. It’s SO DREAMY.)
Arugula and spinach are also great pasta toppers. One of my favorite ways to use arugula is in what I like to call “Salad Pasta,” pictured above! Just make a hearty dish of any pasta you like (I recommend one with mushrooms or bacon or even a cream sauce, rather than one with a tomato sauce), then mix together some lemon juice, olive oil, dijon mustard, and black pepper, dress some arugula, and top the pasta with the mustardy greens and some shaved parmesan. It’s the best of both worlds in a dish!
You can also do this with spinach, or any other type of leafy green. Speaking of spinach though, I just got a big bag of spinach leaves from the market and I’m very excited to make my spinach pesto—recipe for that is at the bottom!
Lastly, let’s talk about leeks. I could go on and on about leeks—I could probably write a whole separate newsletter about this allium. But for now, I’ll say that leeks might be the perfect wintry vegetable if you’re looking for flavor and greenness. The possibilities are endless. Want a cream sauce? Sauté some leeks first. Want some beans but also want something green in them? There’s a leek recipe for that. (It’s below.) Want a soup with undertones of bright, grass-like flavors? Yep, you guessed it, potato-leek soup is the meal for you. Add leeks to omelettes! To pasta! To potatoes! To chicken pot pie!!
It can seem intimidating to buy an entire bunch of leeks for yourself, I know. But this wouldn’t be Cooking For One if I didn’t have a tip for that, too. The easiest way to incorporate leeks into your meals, is to chop up the entire stalk for whatever you’re intending to make (just the white & light green parts of course), then store whatever you don’t use in a Tupperware. Then you can sprinkle already-chopped leeks into a buttery pan whenever the mood strikes you! In a closed container, the chopped leeks will last at least a week.
To paraphrase Camus, even in the middle of winter, you can discover an invincible summer. For me, right now, that summer is coming in the form of greens! I hope you enjoy these recipes, and that they bring you some brightness, sunshine, and all-important vitamins until we break through into the warmer months of spring.
Below are some of my latest greens-inspired recipes! You can also find all my recipes here, at the Recipe Archive. Happy cooking!
Sweet and sour cabbage
Time: 10 minutes | Difficulty: 1/5 | Yield: 1 side dish
This cabbage is addictive. Ever since I whipped it up, I’ve found myself choosing my main recipes around what will go well with the cabbage. I first came up with it when I had some remnants left in a dijon mustard jar that I wanted to use—not enough to be scraped out and used as is, but just enough to become the basis for a vinaigrette on a side dish! I added all the ingredients directly into the jar and shook them up to create the dressing, but you can easily do it with a normal whisk and a bowl. (Or wash and keep the jar, for future dressing shaking!) This dressing is tangy and a little sweet, and pairs perfectly with crunchy green cabbage. I recommend it with anything that has strong flavors, like tofu katsu, beans, or even a hearty soup!
Ingredients:
1/4 of a green cabbage (the rest will keep well in a sealed container or plastic bag!)
Sesame oil
Rice vinegar
Dijon mustard (or you can use a flavored mustard like curry if you’d like!)
White or brown sugar
Method:
Thinly chop the cabbage into strips.
In a bowl, add about a 1:1 ratio of sesame oil to dijon mustard, then a splash of rice vinegar. Whisk well. Add the sugar and whisk, tasting as you add. The result should be balanced between the sweetness of the sugar and sesame oil, and the sourness of the mustard and vinegar.
Add the cabbage into the bowl, and combine.
Spinach pesto
Time: 10 min | Difficulty: 1/5 | Recommendation: Meal prep for the week
This pesto may be made from the humble spinach leaf, but don’t worry, it really packs a punch. It’s a great, healthy (ish?) sauce you can add to a bunch of things—pasta, toast, sandwiches, pizzas, chicken…the pesto-bilities are endless! Adjust the garlic levels to your liking, and start small, as raw garlic can be pretty pungent. The parmesan is also optional if you don’t like/want cheese.
Ingredients/Tools:
Two big handfuls of spinach
1/2 to 1 clove of garlic
Dollop of dijon mustard
Lemon juice
Grated parmesan
Olive oil
Mini food processor
Method:
Wash the spinach leaves, then add them to the food processor with a bit of olive oil, and blend them first. Then add garlic, mustard, lemon juice, and blend. Add in the parmesan, more oil, blend it again. Lastly, add salt, pepper, chili flakes to taste, and any more oil and blending needed to make it smooth and saucy.
Creamy Beans with Leeks and Parmesan
Time: 30 mins-1.5 hrs | Difficulty: 2/5 | Yield: One big serving, or two smaller servings!
What’s better than a big pot of creamy beans? Maybe when those beans also have some leeks and a whole heap of parm to go with them?? Enter, this bowl of beans. It all comes together in one big pot, so as all of the flavors layer on top of each other, you’ll create a deeply flavorful, warming dish. I’ve adapted this from a recipe by Ali Slagle, which I also highly recommend—I’ve taken her technique of adding garlic, then beans, then milk, then cheese, and created my own twist! You can make this with either dried beans, or canned beans—if you’re using canned, you can skip a couple of the steps below. If using dried beans, make sure to really let them simmer for a long time—at least an hour—to ensure they’ll be nice and soft to eat. You can add anything you want to the beans as they’re simmering! I like to add a dollop of Better Than Bouillon, for a big punch of umami that carries through the rest of the dish.
What greens are you incorporating into your meals these days? Let me know!!