"greens" news and stories

Celebrating African American history has a distinctively delicious side in the recipes and ingredients that have made their way through generations of cooks. And leafy greens -- kale, kontomire, mustard, njamma-jamma, pumpkin, sorrel, sweet potato, swiss chard, taro, and turnip -- have played a major part in these dishes.

While we may be familiar with contemporary African American dishes with greens, we may not know the African originals from which they came. Black History Month is a good time to learn more. At congocookbook.com, an online source for African recipes and food history, you can find thumbnail recipes for irio, an East African stew of peas, corn, potatoes and greens; West African calalu, a spicy meat-based soup with dried shimp and okra; a simple Central African fish with sorrel leaves; and Southern African saka-saka, which combines dried fish, cassava leaves, eggplant, garlic, and peppers.

And when you're ready to get serious, pick up food historian Jessica Harris's Africa Cookbook, with its wealth of recipes from all over the continent, and her recently published High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America, to discover the stories behind some of our best-loved foods. Me, I'll take the Kenyan sukuma wiki (above) -- a simple sauté of kale (sukuma), onions, tomatoes, and salt.

Watch this video on how to use dark, leafy greens.

• Don't mourn the loss of the summer produce bounty. A guide to the dark leafy greens of fall -- like spinach, collards, Brussels sprouts, rainbow chard and savoy cabbage -- proves autumn has a cornucopia of seasonal vegetables.
• Cookbook author Paula Wolfert reveals her sacred kitchen object, claiming she "never met a pot of clay she didn't like."
• The common chickpea is spiced up with cumin, turmeric, coriander and cayenne.
• Got a hungry man in your life? Lucinda Scala Quinn, author of "Mad Hungry, Feeding Men & Boys" offers ten tips for feeding men (and boys), like "don't ask if they're hungry" and "train them to fend for themselves." After the tips, she cooks up five guy-approved recipes, like "Flat Roast Chicken" and "Steak Pizzaiola."
• Warm up with hearty stews as the weather cools down. Tomatillos, small green tomatoes popular in Mexican cooking, shine in a "lean, mean slow-cooker recipe" with beef eye of round and pinto beans.

Can you identify spring vegetables? Take this spring vegetable identification quiz on Slashfood to find out.

There are several plants I am familiar with that are considered weeds. Dandelion comes to mind instantly. We'll wait till fall to talk more about our little yellow lawn devils. I was shopping in the Union Square Greenmarket recently during a lunchtime walk, and amongst the multi-colored organic carrots and varietal greens, was purslane. Purlsane is a slightly succulent sprawling weed, with thick reddish stems. It radiates out, flat to the ground from a central root. I had seen this plant in my garden and flower beds before learning from one of my books what it was. Purslane is raised as a crop in other parts of the world, where it is used raw as a salad green, or cooked like spinach. Here we relentlessly pull it from the garden, and just throw it away. I had told a neighbor of mine that seemed to be overrun with the stuff to save it for me a few years ago.

I feel like I'm revealing some deep, dark secret, but here goes: I microwave my salads.

Now, this isn't because I like my lettuce and carrots and salad dressing really hot, it's because of bacteria. I started doing this a couple of years ago, when we had all those recalls and scares involving pre-made bagged salads and spinach. I make my salad on a plate then zap it for about 20 seconds. Just enough to kill something but not make the salad get hot and shrivel.

Now, I have to stress that I have no idea if 20 seconds in the microwave will even do anything to destroy bacteria, but it makes me feel good anyway.

I now return you to your normal Slashfood posts.