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Go green and leafy – bacon optional

Well, optional for you maybe.  Me, I like a nice hunk of bacon nestled in there with some slow-cooked collards.  I got  turned on to eating them with a few shakes of the hot pepper vinegar on the counter at Lamar's, a greasy spoon I used to frequent in Biloxi.

For the longest time I cooked collards very briefly, just long enough to brighten them.  But lately I've reverted to a Southern style recipe more like what I used to get at Lamar's and let them simmer a little longer till they turn darker.  Those are the only kind of greens I do like that way, though.  For everything else the briefer the the better. 

Washing Greens

I think the best way to wash greens is to half fill the sink with cold water and let them soak a while, then swish them around and  drain in a colander.   Something I've noticed when doing this – especially with collards and kale –  are the beautiful silvery air bubbles than form on the leaf surfaces.  They look just like little blobs of mercury.  When I mentioned that to Nancy in this week's Food for Thought she wondered if I were high on something.  Hmph.

"A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables."

–Gertrude Stein

 

 

 

 

Dick Stein joined KNKX in January 1992. He retired in 2020 after three decades on air. During his storied radio career, he hosted the morning jazz show, co-hosted and produced "Food for Thought" with Nancy Leson and wrote and directed the Jimmy Jazzoid live radio musical comedies and 100 episodes of Jazz Kitchen.