Overwintered mustard greens. Lovely sounding, isn’t it? I love what those three words evoke: a food with a stand-up-and-take-notice personality and a patina of flavor possible only after enduring hardship—the freezing depths of winter.

Right about now, you might find OMGs featured on the menu of some season-driven, farm-to-table restaurant in some food-lively town, along with other locally grown or foraged foods described with equally telling adjectives that marshal a world of artisanal food production: hand-pressed, pickled, preserved, house-cured, tree-ripened, aged, fermented, cellared.

But that’s not where I spotted my over-wintered mustard greens. I found them in my community garden plot early last month, after a premature burst of overly warm weather spun me into a frenzied gardening mode.

After a spate of seventy-degree days, off my husband and I went to our plot to prepare it for spring planting. That was when I discovered the mustard greens that I’d left in the ground last fall as an experiment had made through the winter admirably well. That was in mid-March.

Since then we’ve had two hard frosts, which had me scurrying back to the garden to throw plastic over the small seedlings that had begun to emerge, like tadpoles, around the (more…)

Green Curry Soup (Bowl made by Anne Coneys)

I love greens of all sorts and, though I’ve prepared them in many different ways, I most often fall back on the foolproof preparation of braising them. Fine and dandy, but I was beginning to bore myself, not least my boyfriend Mike who isn’t as greens crazy as I am.

Then I saw Anna Thomas’s story “The Soup for Life” in the current issue of Eating Well, one of the food magazines DCCC is currently reading and cooking from. Thomas loves greens, too, and has found an ingenious way to use them—as the basis of wholesome and flavorful soups. On one gray, blustery day she found herself in need of dropping a few pounds but also wanting to create something comforting and delicious to eat. The result? (more…)

Any fool can grow Swiss chard, I like to say. My gardening strategy is a process of elimination. I’ll give something one or two tries, and after that it’s off the list; I’ll let someone else, with greener thumbs than me, grow it. My goal is a garden of foolproof foods, and chief among them, come rain or shine, is Swiss chard. (Other foolproof greens are collards, kale, and mustard greens; but not spinach or watercress.)

Long before I started growing greens, (more…)