The Manifest of Mom-brain too fried

Dear Tamar:

Until my CSA kicks in, I buy a pound of organic baby green mix by the tub. The tub takes up a lot of space in the fridge, so I try to cook it all in one go. But with a 9 month-old baby underfoot, I keep burning the greens, and I’m stumped on what to do with them beyond sautéing them with a bit of garlic. What else can I do that’s quick and delicious? (I think you would say boiling? Maybe I just answered my question.)

-Mom-brain too fried

Dear Mom-brain too fried,

There are several linguistic phenomena that thrill me, but none so much as the auto-antonym. Auto-antonyms are what they sound like: words with two opposite meanings. Like cleave, sanction, fast. To me, these words which both are (cleave: v. to hold fast) and are not (cleave: v. to split) seem like sorcery—like an echo of the fibonacci sequence, or animals’ perfect camouflage.

There are culinary phenomena with auto-antonymic leanings. I think of squid. A cook can choose one of two paths to tender squid: to cook it very quickly—just a breath of grill or wok heat and a squeeze of lemon—or very slowly—a long oven stew lasting several hours. Or short ribs. Cut thin and across the bone (called flanken style) they can be cooked briefly, for a couple of minutes a side, or they can be braised as they would be if cut English style. Yesterday, I was musing on boxed breakfast cereal, and wondering if the reason so many are still so “unhealthy” is because our collective approach to them has been to remove unhealthy ingredients, when we should be adding nuts and toasted oats and olive oil—another instance of a culinary question which might be answered by two opposite solutions.

Your too-fried greens represent a similar state of affairs. Because the problem is overcooking, it would seem logical to do less. This is, indeed, one way of addressing the dilemma. (I’ll get to it in a moment.) First I want to offer the opposite solution: to solve the same problem by doing more.

A pound of baby greens—volumetrically imposing when raw—quickly becomes a petite mound in a pan. Beside grown-up leafy greens, baby greens have thin leaves, flimsy cell-wall structure, and little strengthening fiber. These factors combine to make them ripe for burning. There’s too little hardy matter in the pan for a safe sauté unless you stand, eagle-eyed, watching for the first telling wilt, then flipping off the burner. An alternative that allows you to keep your strategy and technique is to buy more greens—two or three pounds instead of one.

Obviously, three plastic tubs of raw greens is even more volumetrically imposing. But they can all go straight onto the stove at once. Paradoxically, by putting three pounds of baby greens, rather than one, into a (large) hot pan with olive oil and garlic, you slow down the process. Three pounds of greens will crowd each other; they will steam; liquid will be released, all of which works to your advantage. To amplify the calming effect of steaming, add a sprinkle of water along with the greens, and briefly cover the sauté pan. This combination will buy you back the time and flexibility you’re accustomed to from sautéeing more mature, more fibrous greens.

Back onto the seesaw, please! At the opposite end of the spectrum is using your baby greens, all at once, without any real cooking at all. A kale pasta sauce made by Joshua McFadden and written about by Tejal Rao a few years ago involves dropping leaves into a pot of salty water for an instant, then moving them directly into a blender and pureeing them with a bit of water and oil and garlic until they become a smooth, velvety, airy sauce. It is a version of your own solution—to boil the greens—that lets the small amount of greens make dinner for a family. The sauce can be made with whatever combination arrives in your greens mix, and it can be varied endlessly. You can add toasted nuts to the blender, or lemon zest to the finished sauce. You can add a sprinkle of chili flakes for a spicy version, add dollops of ricotta for richness. You can use the sauce to add color to a bowl of delicious-but-tan cranberry beans.

Dear cook, it’s taken me half a lifetime to understand that more than one thing can be true at once. That there is much to be gained by acknowledging how what is coexists with what isn’t. The easiest way is to cook, where you’ll be reminded that often you can do very little, or do very much, to similar effect—especially when you garnish (garnish: v. to remove or take away; garnish: v. to decorate)!