(Photo by John Griswold)
Well, you are out there, now, making it happen, Biggies on the Go. Meanwhile your poor old dad is left back home, doing the best he can with an excellent life of discovery, self-expression, moderate exercise, and delicious, (mostly) healthy food.
What do I have left to teach you both? As in the classroom, it is possible to start anywhere. Let us start with greens.
I get it: you are tired after a day’s work and commute. A frozen entrée or a pound of ground beef, cooked dry, sounds like the best move. How about this instead: Cook up some greens (collard, turnip, mustard, whatever they have at your supermarket) and eat them with leftover rice (always have leftover rice in the fridge), as you consider making chicken thighs for dinner. How about that.
Greens can be stewed deliciously with pork fat and onions and garlic and some vinegar and lots of pepper and maybe a little brown sugar, it’s true. (Frenchy’s fatherly advice was to save the pot likker and drink it later as a tonic, though he cautioned: “You’ll be able to poop through a keyhole.”)
Greens can also be stir-fried with garlic and sesame oil, some soy and mirin, and adding chili crisp at the end. If you do not blanch them first, they will be bitter and fibrous. Get used to it. Life is bitter and tough sometimes, as you have already figured, though that can lead to profit in the end.
Today, however, is for greens with miso. I would suggest using an iron skillet, the kind they made before inferior castings. Do I need to say the old ways are often best? Heat it up for five minutes at medium-high as you prep your ingredients.
Recipe
Soak the greens in a bowl of cold water for a few minutes then rinse several times to get any sand out. Cut off and discard the toughest ends of the stems, then thin-slice the remainder of the stems and chop the leaves.
Dice a green pepper, red pepper, yellow pepper—whatever other single vegetable you have in the drawer, including darkening mushrooms, a yellow onion shrinking in its husk, wilting green onions, or a handful of spinach.
Add a teaspoon of olive oil to the hot skillet and stir-fry the sliced stems for two minutes. Add the chopped leaves, which will still be wet. Cover and cook for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. The goal is to cook the greens hard and fast enough that they do not lose all their own water. You should see the steam and hear the scant water hissing in the skillet. Use the common sense of a father with two boys: If it quiets down, there is something suspicious going on. Stir and add a tablespoon of water as necessary to prevent too much charring.
Near the end, add your other chosen vegetable, turn the heat down, and lightly stir-fry with the cover off.
Move everything to one side of the skillet. Add a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of miso paste and work them together until they are combined. Add a tablespoon of water and stir until a sauce forms. Mix with the greens.
I like to reheat the rice in the microwave, add a dollop of hoisin and mix it in, then serve the greens on top. None of this may be proper, but I love that there are multiple ways bitter, tough things can be put to good account.
