EatLocal365 » leafy greens

How to Store your Leafy Greens to Make them Last Longer

Erik — Wed, 18 May 2011 00:19:13 +0000

Spinach, swiss chard, kale, romaine, lambsquarter… leafy greens are the most nutritious things you can eat. We’ve spent a lot of time learning how to prepare them in ways that make them enjoyable to eat. But they are delicate, and we only go to the market on Saturdays. Wilted, soggy, rotting greens are nasty. How can you keep them fresh for a whole week? Here is what we have learned…

The overarching strategy:

Immediately get rid of any bad leaves, because it’s true that one bad apple ruins the bunch, due to Ethylene.
Keep the greens whole, unless you are using them in the next day or two (see #5).
Get the greens as dry as you can and help them stay dry.
Store the greens properly.
Sequence your meals around the shelf life of your greens, e.g.: fresh salads first, sautés last.

Here are the details:

When we get home from the market on Saturday morning we spend time (up to an hour if we have a lot) sorting, trimming, washing, and sometimes even prepping all of the greens that we bought for the week. It’s a pain and we hate doing it, but it makes cooking for the rest of the week much quicker and easier.

Even so, the real reason we do it is that it makes the greens stay fresh much longer than just shoving them in the fridge and dealing with them later. We do something similar for root vegetables (we remove greens and scrub dirt), but that’s a separate post.

The steps:

Go through the greens and discard any leaves that don’t look good. As they age and wilt, fruits and vegetables release Ethelyne, a gas which triggers other fruits and vegetables to ripen / wilt / rot faster. If there are any in the mix that are already pretty far gone, they will kick off the wilting process as soon as you store the bunch in the fridge. Tossing these will delay the process by a few days.

Trim off any stalks or other pieces that you won’t be using, such as the ends of stems or stalks.

Make sure that your sink is empty of dishes. Give it a quick cleaning and fill it with water. Throw in the greens, one type at a time. Agitate them around to shake off any dirt or sand. Then let them sit for a few minutes so that the grime falls to the bottom as the greens float on top. If we have a smaller amount of greens, we will do this directly in our salad spinner instead of filling the whole sink.
Remove the greens from the sink while being careful not to agitate the water and stir up too much dirt. If you have more greens to clean, leave the water in the sink. If you washed the greens in the spinner, just lift up the basket and dump out the dirty water. Spin them in a salad spinner, in batches if necessary. We usually spin once, pour out the water and shuffle the leaves around, and then spin a second time.
Optional: If you are going to use the greens in the next day or two, you might as well chop them now. If not, they will store better whole.

Lay out a thin (clean) towel (we have these really terrific, big tea towels / flour sack towels; paper towels also work in a pinch). Spread the greens out in a thin layer across the towel. Try not to go any more than two or three leaves deep in any spot. If necessary, fold the towel over and add a second layer.
Roll the towel up tightly and secure it with a rubber band. This process not only dries the leaves now, but storing them in the towel will continue to wick away moisture the entire time the greens are stored in the fridge.
Place the rolled-up towel of greens into a bag. We use green bags. I know, I saw these on TV too and thought they were a joke. But they really do let Ethylene escape, extending the life of whatever produce you store in them. Regular bags, especially Ziploc, trap the Ethylene and accelerate the aging.
Finally, we use our greens, when we can and when we think of it, in an order:

If we’re planning to eat any of the greens raw, e.g. in a salad, we do it early in the week. As greens age, they get more bitter and less tender.
If we’re planning any recipes where cooked greens are the star of the show, we make those by mid-week. The greens can wait a little longer, since they’re cooked.
Finally, if we have any greens left at the end of the week, we cook them and use them as an accent, e.g. pizza topping or frittata.

As an example, here’s a meal plan for one week in May:

Mixed green salad with sunflower thyme pesto (Monday)
Swiss chard with pinenuts and grain (Tuesday)
Herb salad with curry dressing (Wednesday)
Asparagus with “cheezy” sauce (Thursday)
Mashed sweet potatoes with ribbons of collard greens (Friday)

Update:

Two related points that I should have made:

We have been reusing the green bags for about one year now and they are still going strong. We wash them inside and out with dish soap and rinse thoroughly. After a while we invested in a bag drying rack to make things easier.

For shopping at the market, we initially used the green bags, but that wasn’t a good system because the market-fresh produce got the bags dirty, so where to put the produce after we’ve cleaned it?! We found a better set of market bags: washable fine mesh bags.
They can get wet, are machine washable, and you don’t need to worry about plastic bags at the market. They weigh next to nothing, so if you are paying by the pound it won’t hurt.

How to Make Pasta and Spinach with Onion and Goat Cheese “Sauce”

Erik — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 21:56:05 +0000

Because of work, Lindsay has been out of the country for four weeks. I haven’t mentioned it because I was afraid that once we posted about it, it would give me an easy excuse to let things go in the kitchen (and on the blog). In the end, I kept cooking. Very few of my meals were eaten out or ordered in. I’m confident that I can keep it up for one last week, so now the cat’s out of the bag.

As for the blog, I did have the dual problems of needing to cook half as often (leftovers!), and the fact that, when left to my own devices, I tend to cook recipes that I have made before (and that we have posted already). We also changed seasons. While I got good at making dark days dishes, we’ve already posted our best and easiest dark days recipes. Then, after about two weeks, leafy greens came back into season. It’s taken some time for me to remember what to do with them. I’ve eaten a lot of boring salads and straight up sautes, but nothing that I even thought to take pictures of. We were so good with greens last summer, so stay tuned!

Lindsay is the menu planner. I don’t flip through cookbooks and dog-ear them. I pick recipes that I know work and where I already have an expectation of the results. When I wing it, it tends not to be anything worth writing about. Part of the reason I enjoy writing this blog is because it pushes my comfort zone. That’s what we hope to do for others. If we can help you pick your menu, and visual the results AND then we’ve done a service.

This recipe is an example of my improved on-the-fly cooking. I pieced it together from what was in the cupboard. It was fast, easy, and delicious. Give it a try, or make up a version for yourself. Sorry for the vagueness in the measurement amounts. Like I said, I pieced it together from what was on hand and used things up rather than measuring all of them. And I didn’t have the extra hands to take as many pictures as I normally do, which means fewer, and blurrier pictures.

Whole Wheat Pasta and Spinach with Onion and Goat Cheese “Sauce”

Makes 2-3 servings

Ingredients:

Amount	Ingredient	Preparation	Where we bought it (* Union Sq. Greenmarket)
1 bunch	Spinach		Norwich Meadows *
1 – 2 cups	Whole wheat penne (dried)	This recipe actually works better with dried than fresh pasta
2	Yellow onions	Thinly sliced (I used 1 large, 1 small)	Paffenroth Gardens *
2	Shallots	Sliced into rings	Paffenroth Gardens *
4 – 8 cloves	Garlic	Minced	Keith’s Farm *
1 handful	Dried porcini mushrooms	Optional, or you can substitute fresh
1 – 2 TBsp	Goat cheese	I used plain Chevre	Patches of Star Dairy *
1 – 2 TBsp	Olive oil
0.25 – 0.5 cups	Reserved pasta water	Remember to save some of the water that you cook the pasta in!

Directions:

The key to this recipe is the “sauce.” I put that in quotation marks because it isn’t really a sauce, it just a mix of heavily caramelized aromatics (the onions and stuff) with melted goat cheese and a dash of pasta water and oil. The “sauce” lightly coats the pasta and makes it tasty without being too heavy or unhealthy. It helps to use whole wheat pasta, because it gives the dish more flavor.

The one ingredient that I had to buy when I thought of this recipe was the cheese. You want to use very soft, spreadable cheese that will have a liquid texture when melted that will blend into the sauce. A lot of other cheeses would glob up. I went with plain goat’s milk Chevre.
Start by soaking the mushrooms (if using dried). If you put them in water when you start, that should be enough time. The mushrooms are optional, and you could use fresh mushrooms, but in the recipe I think dried porcinis work best, plus we always have some in the fridge because they store so well.
Chop the aromatics. I used a leftover bulb of garlic that had a lot of tiny cloves, and I used the only two onions I had. I added the shallots to make up for the tiny onion. You can’t have too many aromatics in this recipe; they are what make it work.
For the onions, cut them into shards. The best way to visualize this is to picture cutting a globe in half from the North to South pole. Then turn the globe a few degrees and do it again. Repeat until you’ve done it all the way around. Don’t actually cut it this way because it would be unsafe. Cut it in half first at the equator and work flat on the cutting board. You’ll get shorter shards, but you’ll still have all your fingers. When you’re done, all the internal layers of the onion should fall apart, leaving you with many shards. If not, give it a little muscle.

Mince the garlic. If you use shallots, put a few slices through them to cut them into rings.
Once the onions are prepped, start the pasta. I used 2 cups of dry whole whole wheat penne, but in retrospect, given the amount of spinach I had on hand, I would only use 1 cup. Or, use more spinach than I did.
Bring a small pot of water to a boil. Then add the pasta and let it boil fiercely for about 8 minutes. You want to take it off the heat when it’s still a little firm (al dente) because it’s going to continue to cook more later. Drain the pasta but bet sure to save at least 0.5 cup of the water.
Add 1 – 2 TBsp of olive oil to a cast iron skillet and add the aromatics. Cook them while the pasta cooks and the mushrooms soak, until they are nicely browned and caramelized.
Once both the pasta and the aromatics are done, keep the heat on and add the spinach to the skillet, plus a dash of salt and pepper. Cook the spinach only just until wilted, as in the picture below. Like I said, I added too much pasta for this amount of spinach. Stir everything together to spread the oil and the aromatics.
Add about 0.25 cups of the reserved pasta water. Give it all a good stir. Add 1 – 2 TBsp of the goat cheese and stir everything around. The cheese will start to melt and incorporate. Add some more pasta water, a little at a time, until there is just enough “sauce” to coat the pasta with a light film. You don’t want it watery, so be sparing with the water.

Enjoy!