Cascading Kitchen Notes
In the early weeks of the summer CSA Western Washington grows a lot of greens. Wildly nutritious greens of which we need to take FULL advantage. This sauce will use a LOT of greens in a hurry and allow you to keep all that goodness in a jar in the fridge in a sauce with a lot of uses. You'll be wanting the Greens Season to keep going.
Green Sauce
Use up all your Kale, Collards, Chard, Arugula, Asian Mix, Beet Greens, Spinach in one delicious sauce.
Use one or all of these greens to make the sauce. It's a great way to have your leafy greens prepared for future meals throughout the week, or freeze it for another month.
This is a great method for using up a ton of greens before you lose them to the compost pile and then storing the sauce in the fridge for use throughout the week.
Sauté in ½ cup olive oil:
- 1 large onion –diced
- 2-3 cloves garlic
- ½ tsp salt
- ½ tsp black pepper
- ½ tsp nutmeg
- pinch hot red pepper flakes (just a slight warming, but not actually hot)
- 1 cup chopped mushrooms (optional)
Cook until the onions smell sweet…about 10-15 min.
When they're done cooking, pour the onions into a food processor.
While the onions sauté:
- Start a large pot of water to boil. Once it boils add enough salt so the water tastes like the ocean.
- Wash, stem and chop 2-3 bunches of greens (kale, chard, collards, mixed Asian greens, arugula…you get the idea)
- Once the water is boiling add all of the greens.
- Cook 5 min. NO LONGER than 5 min.
- Use tongs to remove the greens into the food processor which already holds the sautéed onions and seasonings. A fair amount of the water will come along and that’s just fine.
- Process the greens into a fine puree.
If you’re going to store the green sauce for another day, cool and place in a glass jar or freeze. (don't freeze the "creamy" version below)
A creamy green sauce option
Before removing from the food processor add 4-5 oz of fresh goat cheese to the kale sauce. It will turn into a creamy green sauce, sure to please the palate.
Store in the fridge. We use this over steamed potatoes or roast veggies, as a layer in a green lasagna or over cooked pasta.
Uses:
In our Green Lasagna recipe, squeeze some over our Avgolemono Rice or
- Mix 2 cups of Green Sauce with 2 cups of Ricotta and serve over 1lb. of cooked pasta.
- Or drizzled over steamed potatoes,
- Or as a topping on scrambled eggs,
- Or on toast with goat cheese…..