Monday February 2, 2009   Ah – I woke up to a nice drizzly chilly morning.  Into the kitchen for a libation sure to warm me deep into my bones.  Takes just a short while to prepare, then gentle sips followed by a good gulp or two.  Yes!  I feel it move through my system, giving me just what I crave.  I’m talking about pot liquor, made from some fresh greens I got at the market yesterday.

in addition to my lentil soup made yesterday, for dinner I made a pot of fresh collard greens.   I love greens and I cook them often.  I used to cook them with a ham hock, but these days it’s just with some sauteed onions and garlic.  I add a little extra water, just so I end up with more pot liquor since I love it so much.

Pot liquor contains lots of essential vitamins and minerals, including iron and Vitamin C.  I learned this when I was real young from my dad’s mom, my Cherokee grandmother, who’d cook greens at the house when she would visit us.  She’d bring her own greens from her garden in Tampa.

As I was growing up in Hialeah, we also grew greens in our yard, as well as malanga ( similar to taro which is what poi is made from), calabasa (similar to acorn squash), boniato (similar to sweet potato), and yucca (similar to potato).  Thanks to the new popularity of latin cuisine, these days you can find these items in Publix.  We just grew them since they were good and cheap and nutritious, and because they grew in our sandy yard in Hialeah in the 60’s.

I didn’t care about nutritional value back then.  I was a kid.  I wasn’t really interested in greens, either.  I wasn’t a picky eater.  Mom was smart.  She told me that the more vitamins I got from my food, the faster my teeth would straighten out and I could get my braces off.  The more vegetables I ate, the faster I would grow out of that awkward adolescent stage of skyrocketing to 5’10” in my 13th summer and looking like Bambi-just-born, all gawky legs and elbows, overbite and fangs.  Sounds lovely, huh?  That was my perception of myself back then and mom knew not to try to argue with it.  I look back at pics of that time and wonder WTF was I thinking????  Gawky?  I don’t think so.  But that was what I thought, and mom knew how to get me to eat my veggies.

But Grandmother B was the one who really schooled me on how many vitamins and minerals and nutrients the garden greens contained, and how especially valuable the pot liquor was.  She told me that drinking pot liquor was what kept her healthy in her old age and let her husband walk miles every day at 72.  She told me it would keep me from getting colds even if my friends had colds.

So her words come back to me whenever I pass fresh greens at the farmer’s market. Especially when everyone I know has the sniffles 🙂

Mmmm, steaming fresh collard pot liquor, a great way to start the day.
Veggies aren’t just for lunch and dinner anymore, you know.