By Penny & Ed Cherubino
There are many delicious reasons to visit farmers’ markets in the spring. During the next couple of weeks, some local farmers’ markets will open for the summer season. A few are located near MBTA stations and serve a larger community of shoppers, including Copley Square, Davis Square, and Kendall Square.
Once upon a time, there was little on offer at the first few markets. Today, some farms are already promoting the strawberries and other delights at their own farmstands and will bring what they can to the first markets. They now grow early-season varieties of these items in greenhouses or hoophouses.
Then again, these markets offer crops like fiddlehead ferns, asparagus, ramps, and wild garlic that make an all-too-short spring appearance. Greens of all kinds will appear next, and we suggest you consider different ways to incorporate these nutritious leaves into salads and beyond.
Warm Salads
When we spot a vibrant cluster of Swiss chard on a farm stand, we grab it for one of our favorite warm green dishes, beans and greens. If your market has a bean vendor like Baer’s Best Beans, you can use those. But this will work with canned beans. Penny will strip the leaves from the stems and chop both. Next, she’ll sauté onions, garlic, and the diced stems in olive oil. When that mixture is al dente, the leaves join the party, along with a drained can of cannellini beans.
Bacon from Stillman’s Quality Meats can star in a traditional warm spinach salad. Sauté the bacon and use the bacon drippings to make a dressing. You can either toss the spinach into the pan or pour warm dressing over it.
Hot Greens
As BBQ and Southern cooking became more popular, we found more greens that you should cook long and slow in our markets. Collards, kale, beet tops, callaloo, and mustard greens can all become wonderful hot dishes.
Culinary historian Jessica Harris describes the African tradition, “…cook them down to a low gravy.” If you’ve ever heard the term “pot likker or pot liquor,” it refers to the cooking liquid from greens, which, in times of scarce resources, was served as a drink.
Green Soups
Soups are another perfect place to add some hot greens to your menu. Many cuisines have traditional recipes that add these budget stretchers to soups with a small portion of protein. Portuguese Kale Soup can have some chorizo. Italian escarole-and-bean soup might include a little sausage. Cuban green soup has a bit of salt pork in it.
Dark, leafy vegetables offer a gold mine of nutrition. On their own, they are low in calories, high in fiber, and full of folic acid, vitamin C, iron, potassium, and magnesium. They are a favorite recommendation of nutritionists to treat a variety of health issues, from being overweight to diabetes.
Next trip to the market, pick up a bunch of greens and try making a warm salad or something hot and flavorful with them. You can start with something familiar, like spinach, or go the whole hog and spend an afternoon simmering a ham hock in a mess of collard greens.
You can find details on opening dates, hours, and vendor lists for area farmers’ markets at www.massfarmersmarkets.org or www.mass.gov/info-details/farmers-markets. In addition, many markets maintain social media pages on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.
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