Traditionally, collards are eaten on New Year's Day, along with black-eyed peas or field peas and cornbread, to ensure wealth in the coming year, as the leaves resemble folding money.
Maybe it's my southern heritage but I can't help it -- I love greens!!When I was a youngun my grandmother Nanny, born in 1900 and raised on a farm in North Carolina, was my role model collard cooker. I can still hear the valve shaking on my mother's pressure cooker while her pot of greens simmered to a delectable tenderness. Kale is my favorite followed by a good, down home mess of collards as pictured above in my recent plate from Dixie Bones Restaurant in Woodbridge, VA. Top off a well cooked and seasoned pot o' greens with a little dash of vinegar and I've died and gone to heaven. Eating greens in the presence of non-greens eaters can stir up comments like "Oh, gross. Please tell me you're NOT going to eat that! They stink and look nasty. Oooooo greeeeens...." Nothing deters me and heck, I recently read that kale is one of THE healthiest veggies you can eat, chucked full of antioxidants, vitamins and even considered to anti-inflamatory. Yummy and nutritious, too? A winning combination, I'd say! My husband enjoys greens along with me but our daughter Shannon is the only child that inherited the greens gene. I've discovered that adding a pinch of baking soda to the water in the cooking pot the secret to making greens tender. The addition of a few other ingredients help season them up just fine. (HINT: ham hocks) For a while my son Todd and I got on the green shakes bandwagon. You Tube is full of demonstrations for this, but these shakes are a blenderized concoction of bananas, frozen berries, a little sweetener and any kind of green leafy veggies. This packs a powerful glass of raw nutrition and as my two year old granddaughter might say, "Try it. You like it!"
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