You Can’t Have Any Pudding If You Don’t Eat Your Meat

This is the tomato plant that I grew from a seed and knocked all the leaves off when I planted it in the garden. It’s about 4 feet tall and has a half dozen green tomatoes on it.

It is the smallest of my tomato plants. I have two that are as tall as I am with huge branches flopping out the sides of the cage. They are sagging with green tomatoes. The early girl has a few that have gone shiny and yellow-ish. I think I’m going to be eating home grown tomatoes very soon.

I’m convinced that the early settlers stayed alive by eating greens. But you never hear about that. You never find pioneer tested recipes for turnip and beet greens. I don’t even try that hard and I have giant piles of greens that we can’t even begin to keep up with. Especially since I represent about 90% of the greens consumption in my household. The Dining section had an article about all the plant tidbits that most people throw away that you can eat. More garden stuff for the plate.

Last weekend I finally got around to picking some beets to roast. They were soft-ball size with big healthy tops. I saved all the greens plus I yanked up some kale.

The first thing I do with my greens is soak them in water so all the slugs and snails rise to the surface. I know, gross. Better to find them now than later. Then I sauté in olive oil and garlic. Even though the greens shrink when cooked there was a giant bowl which I still haven’t finished. (They taste great with a little ume plum vinegar sprinkled on them.)

The other night I ate about 4 pounds of vegetables for one meal. I didn’t set out to eat that much I just kept finding more stuff in the fridge and thinking, “I want some of this, too.” My digestive system still hasn’t figured out what happened.

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3 Responses to You Can’t Have Any Pudding If You Don’t Eat Your Meat

  1. Kira says:

    All I can think now is SLUGS! SNAILS!! NO MORE GREENS EVER!!

  2. Kristin says:

    Kira, you’re lucky you didn’t grow up on a farm! 🙂

    I liked the NY Times article about plant tidbits, but the problem is that I’m already getting SO much food from our CSA half-share that we can hardly eat it all even if I’m not aggressive about using the trimmings (I don’t represent 90% of the vegetable consumption in my household, but probably at least 70%). I can’t bring myself to throw out the beet greens or kohlrabi tops, and I’ve even cooked the radish leaves and spring onion tops, but last week I just couldn’t deal with the armload of fresh fennel stems and leaves, on top of everything else.

  3. Marvin says:

    Awesome tomato plant! I am jealous. The jungle is too hot to grow them that big.

    Your post’s title is one of my favorite Pink Floyd clips.

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