One of the things which I have been interested in for a while is how to get more green leafy vegetables (usually referred to as ‘greens’) into our diet, and I admit the problem has mostly been me! Greens are –
- Easy to grow and tolerate shading well,
- Prolific in their production of edible bits, and
- High in nutrition
So what’s not to love? Well, they can also taste like crap! Or I should say they taste like crap to me. I am not a fan of ‘bitter’ or ‘peppery’ and many greens are bitter/peppery or acquire bitterness/pepperiness as they age. So I needed to find recipes which could include greens, but would not taste like crap.
During some late night research on the TV, Anthony Bourdain came to my rescue during a tour through the Greek Islands. He told me about Horta. Strictly speaking horta is a stack of wild greens boiled up and eaten simply with a drizzle of olive oil and a squeeze of lemon. The aforementioned greens could be just about anything – dandelion, amaranth, chicory, purslane, dock, fathen, plantain, in fact just about any edible weed with green leaves can go into it. It makes a dish that is filling, nutritious, almost free and can be made at a time of year when there is little else growing. As my friend and teaching partner Danielle calls it – hungry gap food.
So, was this answer to a maiden’s prayer? Possibly, but not mine. My tastes run a bit Anglo for this olive oil and lemon juice approach, but on the TV show they did it a different way, with onions and tomatoes. This was more my style! I wanted to test it out with silver beet (if I found that unpalatable I may as well stop right there) so this is what I put together –
Horta (Anglo style)
1 medium onion
3 medium tomatoes
1 garlic clove (crushed)
3 large silver beet leaves.
A good pinch of salt and a bit of pepper
1 glug of olive oil
Method
Dice onion and tomatoes, cut up the silver beet into 25mm strips, leaving out most of the central rib.
In a frying pan place the olive oil and heat,
Toss in the onion and garlic, fry a for a few minutes to caramelise
Toss in the tomato and cook down for 5 or 10 minutes
Toss in the silver beet and cover, cook down for 10 minutes then cook uncovered for another 5 minutes.
Add salt and pepper and serve.
Y’know what? It tasted pretty damn good!
It has become a staple in our house and while I still use silver beet as the base I have started throwing in other leaves such as sweet potato, fathen, mallow, choko, amaranth, purslane, mizuna etc. I am yet to give the dandelion leaves ago but in future I will. I have decided that I will pass on the choko leaves, they are a bit rough and I don’t like the texture (think tomato and onion flavoured sandpaper). The experimenting continues!
If you want to make green leafy vegetables a bigger part of your diet but are not sure how, give Anglo-horta a go, it is a great way to test the waters.
