Nettle

Nettles just might be my all time favorite edible plant.  At Growing Lots, we work so hard cultivating all the veggies that make their way to our plates.  Nettles however, just show up for us!  Nettles are among the first edible plants to break ground with their bright green nutrient dense leaves each spring.  When I’m weary of winter their early arrival makes my hungry heart soar! Despite their “weedy nature” and temporary stinging qualities they couldn’t be a more welcome gift. 

This entire plant is edible!  Nettles are a great source of a wide variety of vitamins and minerals.  Because of their extraordinary nutrient density the first thing I use nettles for is nettle broth or soup!  I think of these recipes as spring tonics!  I can easily cook them up in my eggs for breakfast or make a nettle quiche that I can enjoy through out the week.  I also love celebrate spring by treating myself to a couple novel nettle dishes like farro pasta with nettle sausage or nettle ravioli!  Keeping their super food qualities in mind they make excellent additions to smoothies. It’s also easy to think of nettles as a green that’s interchangeable with cooked spinach therefore nettles do well in palak paneer or simply steamed/ sautéed with garlic!  Being that a good nettle patch is typically very productive I will keep harvesting nettles through out the spring and early summer to preserve in a few ways.  The easiest way to preserve nettles is to dry them for tea.  You can also grind dried nettle leaves up to use as a super food powder to add to soups and smoothies through out the year.  Lastly I freeze them! You can blanch and freeze nettles to store as is or you can whip up a batch of nettle pesto to freeze for quick snack dips, pasta’s and savory pastries! 

 Soups

Nettle Broth

Nettle Sausage and white Bean Soup

 Pastas

 Farro Pasta with Nettles and Sausage

Nettle Ravioli

 Nettle super food smoothies

Foraged Tropical Nettle Smoothie

 Palak paneer

Nettle Palak Paneer

 sautéed

Saute'ed Stinging Nettles

 Nettle Tea

Indigenous Nettle Tea Medley

 Super Food Powder

Super healthy Nettle Powder

 How to Freeze nettles

How to Blanch and Freeze Nettles

 Pesto

Walnut Nettle Pesto

 Nettle quiche

Stinging Nettle Quiche

 Savory nettle pastry

Nettle Cheese Puff Pastry

Salad Mix

Behold the backbone to any good CSA!  Salad mix is one of our most popular items for our CSA and markets.  You’ll find lots of salad recipes sprinkled in with so many of our other veggie profiles that I’m not going to list recipes for salad here…but I am going to brag a bit about what makes our mixes so awesome!  Also I’m going to give you a few tips about how to keep your salad in its original state of awesomeness for over a week! 

We call our salad blend magic mix! Aside from being a blend of our favorite lettuces, and flavorful mustard greens the magic comes from the hot pink wild greens and edible flowers we mix in as often as possible! The star of this mix is magenta spreen lambs’ quarter, which is so nutrient dense that it’s hot pink star burst center literally sparkles with mineral crystals! We also add plenty of baby amaranth which brightens the mix with its’ purple and bright pink hues.  Add a dusting of edible flowers and you pretty much have an edible version of a magical fairytale!

The secret to keeping the magic alive once you get your salad home is to give it a quick rinse to refresh before sticking it in the fridge.  Use a salad spinner to dry off your salad, but also to store it. Storing it in a salad spinner can help your salad last for weeks!  There’s a reason salad comes in big plastic clamshells at the grocery store, they help salad last longer than a plastic bag would.  Salad spinners are easily found at thrift stores or are relatively affordable to buy new.  If your committed to eating plastic free local greens it will be a valuable kitchen tool for years to come!  

Spinach

Spinach is one of the hardest crops for me to grow!  At one point in my farming career I swore I was DONE trying to grow spinach.  Spinach is extremely temperature sensitive, and seems to need just the right blend of nutrients to thrive.  Plus I think this green is about as popular with pests as it is people.  So every time you are eating a spinach from Growing Lots, just know that your farmer’s are dang proud of their accomplishment!  

 There is no shortage of things you can do with spinach.  Just because it’s a salad green does not mean it’s only good for salads, quite the contrary!  Spinach can be cooked up into a variety of soups, pasta’s, savory pastries, eggs bakes and quiches, as well as served raw in salads, wraps and sandwiches! I’ve listed many recipes in all these categories below!  I easily came up with a ton of recipes for spinach.  If you run out of spinach before you can try all of these recipes know you can substitute with many of the other greens you’ll find in your CSA!  

 Pasta

Easy Spinach Lasagna Recipe

Miso Spinach Pesto and Ramen Noodles

5 Ingredient Spinach and Parmesan Pasta

Garlic Butter and Spinach Pasta

Spinach Chicken and Butternut Gnocci

 Soup

Spring Spinach Minestrone

Spinach Chicken Soup with Carrots and Mushrooms

Spinach Egg Drop Soup

Spinach Tomato and Cannellini Bean Soup

Spicy Sausage Spinach and White Bean Soup

 salad

Easy Japanese Style Spinach Salad

Cannellini Beans With Spinach

Classic Spinach Salad

Spinach and Chicken Waldorf salad

Butternut Squash Spinach Salad with Maple Rosemary Vinaigrette

Lentil Spinach and Chickpea Salad

 Curry

Saag Paneer with Feta

Spinach Lentil and Chickpea Dahl

 Pastry

Easier Then You Think Greek Spinach Spanakopita Pie

 Creamed spinach, dips, side dishes

Vegan Creamed Spinach

Spinach Yogurt Dip With Sizzled Mint

 Breakfast

Green Eggs and Ham Bake

Spinach With Chickpea Fried Egg Skillet

Kale

Kale gets a reputation of being the basic bee of greens!  But on the farm veggies are not food fads, they are simply what grows.  Even though kale chips aren’t currently sweeping the nation there are still 100’s of tasty kale recipes to be explored.  We always offer some sort of green in each of our CSA boxes, during the thick of the season you’ll find kale, collards, and chard on almost constant rotation!  Keep in mind that many recipes that call for greens can be easily switched out for another, especially kale!  

There’s endless ways to prepare kale beyond salads, though a good kale salad is not to be overlooked! I love slightly charred kale in a salad which is easy to do if your family has a love for cooking on the grill all summer long.  Kale always goes well with any egg dish!  So many soups are completed with a bunch of kale torn up or sliced into ribbons.  There’s endless ways to incorporate kale into smoothies!  Kale is easily sautéed as a side with garlic, or cooked down as a creamed green! It also can be wilted and tossed in with pasta or cooked into a risotto!  There’s even kale pestos and sauces that can be used as condiments that go with pretty much everything!  

Pro tip:  Kale can go into just about anything, but skip the kale brownie recipes.  My mom tried this with her grandkids once, and they ran away crying “grandma’s putting salad in our brownies.”  It didn’t turn out well for anyone…

 The Internet is rife with kale recipes here’s a few links that list dozens of intriguing kale recipes:

 31 Ways to Enjoy Kale Beyond Salad

37 Ways to Eat Kale Cause You Can Never Have Enough!

50 Ways To Never Get Bored of Eating Kale

Bok Choy

This elegant green grows abundantly both spring and fall at Growing Lots! It’s related to cabbage so it carries that famously crisp smooth flavor! It’s most commonly used in stir fries. It can easily be grilled or braised. Bok Choy is also a popular vegetable used in Ramen or Asian inspired soups.

Soups

Bok Choy Chicken Soup

Bok Choy vegetable Pho

Bok Choy Ramen Bowl

Stir Fries

Bok Choy Shitake Stir Fry

Bok Choy and Spring Pea Stir Fry

Ginger Scallion Garlic Bok Choy Stir Fry

Grilled/ Roasted/ Braised

Grilled Bok Choy

Sesame Roasted Bok Choy

Salads

Simple Bok Choy Salad

Bok Choy Salad With Ramen Crunch

Mustard Greens

This vegetable energizes me like non other! It’s hot pungent flavor warms me up and gets me going when I am often feeling sluggish. I swear a good heap of mustard greens can also cut right through my brain fog. This plant is a good friend to me and I am grateful!

Mustard greens are used like so many other greens! Serve it cooked down as a side of greens, add it to stir frys, use it in place of lettuce on your favorite sandwich. Sometimes mustard greens can even get big enough to serve as a wrap and you can skip the sandwich bread all together. Tear it up and add it to soups and whole grain salads. Did I mention that mustard greens and beans are like a match made in heaven?

Southern Style Mustard Greens

Crispy Tofu Bibimbap Bowl with Mustard Greens

White Bean Soup With Mustard Greens and Parmesan

Mustard Greens with Chorizo and White Beans

Easy Curried Mustard Greens

Chinese Mustard Green Stir Fry

Shitake Mushrooms and Mustards Stir Fry

Bacon and Egg Mustard Green Veggie Sandwich

Collard Greens

At Growing Lots we grow Collard Greens for science! We are in partnership with the University of Minnesota doing a three year study on the ecological benefits urban farming brings to the city. Collard Greens are our guinea pig or test crop rather. We are hoping to gain insight on how our regenerative farming practices might effect things like storm water run off, carbon capturing, and biodiversity. We hope someday these studies will be used to influence both policy and practice to help make way for more Urban Farming! So we are not only eating greens cause they are good for us, we eat them for the sake of good science!

The best tip you will ever get about cooking with collard greens is to cook the crap out of them. They are much tougher then other dark leafy greens, so take that into account. Often times cooking the crap out of collard greens means cooking them up with something greasy like coconut oil or bacon. You can also slow cook collard greens with well seasoned beans in a crock pot. Eating raw collard greens can make you gassy so they don’t do well in salads or smoothies. They do however cook up well in soups, and cook down great into heaps of greens that are wholesomely nourishing!

Crock Pot Black Eyed Peas and Collard Greens

Quick Southern Collard Greens and Bacon

Vegetarian Southern Collard Greens

Vegetarian Collard Green Soup

Curried Collard Greens

Ham Hock Soup With Collard Greens

Chard

Chard wins the prize for most the most beautiful green!  Chard comes in a variety of colors; white, red, pink, orange, yellow! At Growing Lots we only grow a mix called bright lights rainbow chard, because we can’t get over how gorgeous all the colors are!  Chard is very similar to beet greens, offering the same sweet earthy flavor.  Use them in much the same way as you would kale; sautéed, as a creamed green, in soups, sauces, pasta’s or with your morning eggs!  I’ve included the long lists of fabulous kale recipes that I easily scrounged up on a quick google search.  The internet currently doesn’t celebrate chard in the same way as kale, but make no mistake they are interchangeable!  Below I’ve linked up a few extensive lists that cover every angle of cooking with greens.

Pro tip:  Do not let anyone tell you to discard those gorgeously colorful chard stems!  People often recommend doing this with kale too, but I never discard kale stems either.  With chard especially the stems are among the best part, and they add such a colorful pop!

47 Greens Recipes That Go Beyond Salad

37 Ways to Eat Your Greens Cause You Can Never Get Enough

50 Non Boring Ways to Eat Healthy Greens

Arugula

Arugula is the most popular pizza topping among millennials.  I know it seems like I just made up that fact… but it’s probably true!  Baby arugula has a mild nutty/ peppery flavor.  Overgrown/ mature arugula (also known as rocket) can pack an exciting punch!  Beyond being the most smashing pizza topping of the decade, arugula makes for an awesome salad green, it wilts into broth giving soup a touch or greenery, goes well with all sorts of eggy things, and can be served a couple different ways with pasta. Arugula makes a very flavorful pesto that can be used in pastas, lasagna, or in covering roasted veggies! 

Pro tip: If you’re are a fan of more flavorful arugula you might not find overgrown arugula at a farmer’s market (lets face it, we live in the Midwest and spicy just doesn’t sell) but you can keep an eye out for holey arugula instead.  Holey arugula shows up often on the local organic farming scene, flea beetles can’t resist munching in it, and unless the farmer goes through the trouble of covering their arugula beds with row cover it’s just going to holey.  The good news is that the flavor that makes arugula so popular is actually what the plant uses to repel pests. If it’s been munched on by pests, arugula tastes better!  

31 Ways to Eat Arugula All the Time Without Getting Sick of It!