collard slaw
… aaaand we’re back.
Subscribing to a CSA means never knowing what you’re going to eat. (CSA is an Esperanto anagram for Pay First, Pick Up Later.) It’s like getting a mystery ingredient on a cooking show. You have to bend your kitchen skills to it. Chances are you’ll get a bunch of vegetables that you never cooked before, because they’re not what you’d normally buy. Say you never bought a bunch of kale at the Shop-N-Save. Sign up for a CSA, and you’ll have to figure out what to do with it. Same goes for turnips. Same goes for papalo, or it would, if anyone knew what to do with that stinky stuff. Use all of it and let nothing spoil by the time the next pickup rolls around, and you win a prize. I’m not sure what the prize is, because I haven’t won it. I suspect that it’s the kind of hearty good health that involves a lot of trotting.
One thing I’ve been faced with from my CSA is a wealth of collards. Now, collard greens have a long history in this country. It’s been argued that, were it not for the deft ways with such greens of deracinated African cooks, white Southern slaveholders might’ve died young of poor nutrition. Let no one say that the relatives of the cabbage are without iron, or irony. One thing you can count on with a summer full of collards, is that people will complain about it. No one wants to stand over a hot stove in late August or early September, stirring the collards in boiling water or fat. I have a solution for that: cook them without heat. Collards are cabbage and cabbage mixed with vinaigrette makes cole slaw, so make a slaw of the collards and let the acid do the cooking.
