Eat Your Greens

Day 16 since I caught the nasty virus and it is pretty much gone--finally!  Wow!  What ever happened to a week to ten days?  Why has it stretched to fourteen plus!!???  My wife still has the hacking cough and is on day 11.  She is feeling better, but it won't be gone for another several days.  Oh well, we were virtually trapped inside for nearly a week with heavier snowfall than is normal for our area, so at least we weren't missing out on a lot of planned activities.  We drove through the slush yesterday to do our weekly shopping and went out to lunch as well, so we're not quite as stir crazy today.  On to today's topic...

My family is not tremendously picky when it comes to eating veggies.  If I make it, we will all eat it, even if it's not the most creative dish.  That makes it easy on me in one respect, but I hate making several things for one meal on a regular basis.  I am the king of one pot, one casserole meals.  And I know a lot of families have members who are somewhat picky about veggies, so I have a strategy to slip them in more regularly and make things easier on you, the chef of the house!

In my last blog, I had made a nice vegan Irish stew and mentioned at the end that sometimes I make colcannon to go along with it.  Colcannon is an Irish version of mashed potatoes that puts greens right into the potatoes to get young'ns to eat more greens with minimal effort.  They often put cabbage and green onions in colcannon; I used kale, green onions and parsley the other night when we had some leftover stew to eat and wanted a slightly different experience.

Kale Colcannon

• 3 lbs Yukon gold potatoes or red potatoes, scrubbed with skins on and cut into 1 inch dice
• 1 bunch kale, washed and rinsed well, finely chopped
• 1 bunch green onions (6-8), washed and diced
• 1 bunch flat leaf parsley, washed and chopped
• A few tablespoons Earth Balance vegan margarine
• Some So Delicious Coconut Milk Drink
• A few cloves freshly minced garlic
• Salt and pepper to taste

Boil the potatoes until tender but still firm (15 minutes or so depending on your dice size).  Chop other veggies while the potatoes boil.  Saute the onions in a nonstick skillet and then add garlic, parsley and kale continuing to saute until all are heated through and wilted, but still brilliantly green.  Drain potatoes and mash adding margarine and coconut milk until you get the consistency you want.  Add greens to potatoes and mix well to incorporate all together.  Salt and pepper to taste.  Serve any time you would normally serve mashed potatoes but this is especially wonderful with a ladle full of Irish Stew over the nice mound of potatoes and greens!

Spinach is also a big staple in our house.  Though I am a fan of fresh spinach and spinach salads, I am more a fan of the value of chopped, frozen spinach.  Do you know how much fresh spinach you would have to cook to yield one pound of chopped, cooked spinach?  A LOT!  The chopped, frozen stuff is an incredible value when you think about all the nutrition you get from just one reasonably priced bag of veggies.  In any event, I add spinach to a lot of casseroles and pastas and just call it Florentine!  One of our meals this week was our vegan mac 'n cheeze and I Florentined it (notice how I verbed that?!) to make it a more balanced meal since I did not feel like making side dishes.  Throw a pound of spinach into any pasta or rice dish and see what you think!

Mac 'n Cheeze Florentine

• 12-16 oz whole wheat pasta (elbows, corkscrews, etc.)
• 1 recipe Cheesy Sauce (from January 4, 2012 blog)
• Extra So Delicious Coconut Milk Drink
• 1 lb frozen chopped spinach, thawed in the microwave, squeezed dry

Put your pasta to boil and cook about 10-12 minutes while you make the cheesy sauce.  One the sauce is made, thin with some coconut milk to get the consistency you want, then add the thawed spinach that has been squeezed as dry as possible.  Mix sauce and spinach with pasta and serve or bake in casserole with breadcrumb topping--your choice.  This is also delicious with vegan Parmesan sprinkled on top.

Vegan Parmesan

• 1 cup walnuts
• 1/4 c small nutritional yeast flakes (1/2 cup large flakes)
• 1/2 tsp salt

Process nuts in small food processor until ground, add yeast flakes and salt and process again until uniformly mixed.  Store in refrigerator and sprinkle on soups, salads, pastas, and, of course, on vegan Mac 'n Cheeze!