Greens

Take the cleaned greens and pack a very large (12-quart) soup pot with the pieces.  Add 2 cups of water. You probably won’t be able to see the water for all the greens in the pot.

Add salt and pepper and poke at the greens to get the salt and pepper past the top layer of pieces.  Cover the pot with a tight fitting lid or foil. Turn the heat to high and cook the greens for 5 minutes.

Using tongs to move the greens around, try to push the top layers down and bring the bottom layers up. Recover and cook on high another 3 minutes.

Repeat the stir, cover, and cook process until your greens have cooked down to about 2-3 cups but remain a bright green.

Remove from heat and remove from pot to retain bright green color. If the greens remain in the pot, they will darken in color.

It doesn’t seem to affect the taste, but they look more appetizing when lighter colored.

This is an excellent source of iron; chop up the leftovers and add to your favorite vegetable soup.

Bacon option: If you eat pork, fry 2 slices of bacon when you start steaming the greens. Set aside the crisp bacon and add the drippings to the greens after the first 5 minutes of cooking. When serving the greens, crumble the crisp bacon on top.

Serves 4.

Spice up your greens

To eat the greens, remove a serving size with tongs or a slotted spoon so you don’t end up with a lot of juice on your plate.  Top with Pace medium salsa or Trappey’s peppers in vinegar sauce.  The kind of pepper sauce that Southerners use is a bottle of small green peppers soaked in vinegar.  If you run out, just add vinegar to the remaining peppers and allow to soak up the flavor for about a week.

*Packaged greens versus bunches of greens: If you buy bundles of greens instead of cellophane packages of chopped greens, remove the strings from the bundles and wash in a regular washing machine without soap or any kind of cleaning powder.  The reason you wash them in a clothes washing machine is that greens are grown in sandy soil and it is difficult to get all the sand out of the joints in the plants.  Washing in a washing machine completely cleans out the sand and chops up the greens into bite-sized pieces.  If you buy greens in a cellophane bag, they have been chopped and washed well before packaging.

Mustard greens cooked down by 50% after 5 minutes.
After cooking on high with a tight fitting lid for 5 minutes, the bulk of fresh greens had reduced by about 50%.
48 cups of fresh greens reduced to 5 cups cooked greens.
This 3 gallon soup pot was packed with 48 cups of torn pieces of fresh greens, plus 2 cups of water. After the greens steamed for 10 minutes, the result was about 5 cups of cooked greens.