Mess of Greens

full bellies | warm welcomes

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Channeling Little Bankok: Collard Greens & Venison Larb

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For the past 5 years of  my life, the closest Thai restaurant has been two hours away in Memphis or Jackson. Since this is one of my MOST favorite kinds of food, and we lived around the corner from an AMAZING hole-in-the-wall place in Atlanta where we ate at least once a week, this had been one of the hardest parts of small-town Mississippi life. It meant that I needed to figure out some approximations of my favorite dishes…and I can say that I’ve gotten pretty good at massaman and green curry and larb.
But y’all! NOW, we live 30 minutes from a nice little spot in Hattiesburg, so we can basically eat Thai food whenever the craving strikes. It’s so fantastic.

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Dolly Parton, Chicken & Dumplings, and Food that Comforts

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When we had our son, Wagner, my entire church and most of our coworkers kept our bellies full and our freezer stocked for nearly three months. We had cassaroles, salads, fruit, cold-cuts, rolls, cakes, venison burgers… oh, and PIES. So good pies. This was the most wonderful gift we could have been given, especially since we were sleep deprived, cranky, and barely functional. It’s a tradition that’s not unique to Mississippi for people to “fix you something.” All over the south, when someone has a baby, or someone gets sick, or someone’s family member dies, food appears on the doorstep with prayers and love. It’s the most amazing thing. I’ve had people send love (also known as food) when my own grandmothers and grandfather died, and as my mother was battling (and winning) lung cancer.
Food comforts in ways that words can’t in certain situations. My favorite thing to take in situations where comfort food is called for is chicken and dumplins (it also happens to be one of my favorite things to eat in the world, so I figure it’s probably everyone else’s, too, right?) They are warm, and fill your belly, and just right. Honestly, “fixing you something” is this incredible act of love and hospitality that is one of my most favorite things about our south.

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Food, Race, and the Beloved Community

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Today we remember the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., but also it’s an opportunity to honor the incredible sacrifice so many people of color and their allies made to bring us closer to equal justice under the law.

     A few years ago I toured the King Center in Atlanta with a group of high school students. I’d never been there, and to be honest, it affected me so strongly that I really had no business being a chaperone. As a southerner, I live and wrestle with our region’s history every day. With my family’s story, with our current realities and structural inequity that we feel as residual effects of the days of slavery and segregation. Everyone I know does, no matter their race or ethnicity or age, although we may not always realize it.
     This holiday often ends up as a time for people to look around and say, “Hey, King was a great guy. Too bad what happened to him, but he said we should respect and love each other.” Instead, I would urge us to remember the awful violence that SNCC members faced by choosing to sit-in at lunch counters around the south. Inspired by four North Carolina A&T students in Greensboro on February 2nd, 1960, other young people took beatings, faced embarrassment, were screamed at, and jailed for wanting to eat at a meal at a lunch counter – a meal, no doubt, that was likely on the menu of every lunch counter no matter the ownership or clientele.

Our food, an aspect of our culture that all southerners point to when defining our region, also served as a dividing line for much of our history. For too long, racism kept white southerners from having black southerners share their meals at the table, even though they were almost certainly cooking and serving them.
This is the fraught legacy of southern food.
Our food is nourishing, it holds memories, it brings people together, it reminds us of home and family, yet its legacy, like everything else in the south, is tainted with the stains of oppression and segregation. I think the young people who sat at the counter that day in Greensboro knew the power of food, the power of sharing a meal with others, and how our identities are shaped by what and how we eat. They knew that food can bring us together even while other things tear us apart. I take heart knowing that eating together at the table is one of the most integral traditions in our region, but know that in order to reach King’s idea of the Beloved Community, our food must be shared and eaten together across our lines of difference. I hope that Mess of Greens gives me a chance to share my attempts as a white woman to confront our shared history and be honest about it, while bringing people together to eat and look to the future.

We can’t look ahead before we look back, though. It isn’t pretty, y’all, but if we’re honest – if we take a hard, real look at where we’ve been and what role we’ve played and are playing in the south’s own mess – we can make change.

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

Spicy Sweet Potato and Black Eyed Pea Burgers with Cilantro-Avocado Crema

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Can I tell you a secret? I actually don’t like black eyed peas. Whenever New Year’s day comes around  (the one day of the year when I absolutely HAVE to eat some for luck– one part superstition and one part tradition), I try to think of ways to cook black eyed peas that make them NOT taste like damp earthy mush. I’ve had some pretty good luck the past few years (ha! no pun intended) with pickled peas, bep and pecan hummus, lucky soup and mess of greens soup, but this year I wanted to try something new.

I’ve also been looking for new ways to get my little to eat vegetables, because my standard tricks of roasting or giving him a dipping sauce or covering them in cheese weren’t working anymore. I needed to up my game. So, recently I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and make a BEP-based veggie burger that is fit for a toddler (but also delicious for grown-ups). This wasn’t ALL fun and games as I ended up having to do some modifications after the first taste test (have you ever had a mashed potato burger? no? well, I don’t recommend it.) But NOW, I’ve got a recipe where the flavors just knocked my socks off, and my little guy LOVED the burger and nearly ate all of it. My honey (a carnivore all the way) even had thirds.

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Pickled Mustard Greens

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I was thinking about the crazy abundance of mustard greens that I had in my fridge the other day (Maybe I got a little too excited at the .50/bunch sale at Kroger…) and wondered if pickled greens were a thing. With a little googling, it turned out that they ARE a thing and super popular in Vietnamese, Chinese, and Thai food! Hooray! This was AWESOME news as I’d already decided it was going to be a thing for me even if it wasn’t a real thing.

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The Seat Heater

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Are y’all watching the National Football Championship?!?
ermm.. probably not if you’re reading MoG, but YOU SHOULD BE if you’re a real southerner. I mean Clemson AND Alabama? C’mon.

As a born-and-raised Mississippi girl, I’ve gotta cheer for the SEC tonight (ROLL TIDE!) but my honey is a ACC guy all the way. Tonight would probably be contentious except I really only watch football as a social thing. (I am like 90% sure that a bunch of other southerners feel the same way but are too scared of the super intense football fans to say so. But I’ll say it. “Meh.”)

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Homecook How-to: Homemade Chicken Broth

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If there’s one thing that every down-home cook needs to know how to do, it’s how to make homemade stock.  Thankfully, it’s SUPER easy, economical, and adds incredible flavor to any dish that calls for chicken stock. Here’s how to do it.
 
Homemade Chicken Stock
Makes about 12 Cups
What you need:
-4 whole large carrots or 1/2 to 1 cup of baby carrots (OR you can also use 1/2 to 1 cup of carrot ends and tops that you’ve saved & frozen from other cooking)
-4 large celery stalks (OR 1 cup of celery tops and ends, saved & frozen from other cooking)
-A large stock pot
-1 whole hen (I had a roasting hen, which works fine, but is MUCH bigger than a regular old hen. ALSO I am VERY partial to Sanderson Farms chicken, as the chicken is super juicy, the company is based in my hometown, plus all of the staff and the Sanderson family are just great people.) OR, if you aren’t using the chicken meat for another recipe (see Chicken and Dumplings),  You can use a chicken carcass/saved bones from other cooking that you’ve done.
-Enough water to cover your hen and veggies
-1 large bunch of parsley and thyme
-1 whole red/yellow onion cut into 4ths or 6ths. (Also, if you have onion skins saved, those can be thrown in as well to give the broth a richer, deeper color)

What you do:

Salt the pot, then Put it ALL in a pot, pouring water over until the hen is entirely covered (or nearly covered) and boil for 30 minutes, then simmer for at least 3 hours. If you’re using a whole hen, this will make the meat just fall off the bone and be ready to shred for other recipes.
 
Once it’s ready, remove from the heat and strain the broth, retaining the chicken and letting it cool so that you can easily (and safely without burning your fingers off) remove the meat.
Throw the vegetables away, and place the broth in a container in the refrigerator overnight or until the fat rises to the top and becomes firm.
 
Once the fat has floated to the top and hardened, you can VERY easily skim it off the top, making it a bit healthier.
 

See? It’s SO easy once everything has cooled. However, don’t throw this down your sink. Make sure to put the fat in a plastic bag or jar so that it doesn’t clog up all of your pipes.

You’ll be left with a gorgeous colored gelatin that can be frozen OR used immediately in your soups, stews, or other recipes. it’s SO cheap to make, especially if you’ve been saving your vegetable odds-and-ends in a plastic bag in the freezer. Also, don’t be alarmed about the gelatinous texture… once you heat it up it’ll turn back into a liquid.

Greens with Spicy Pot Likkor and Cornmeal Dumplings

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 It’s the time of year when greens are ubiquitous down here. It’s winter, the farms and gardens are full of them, and y’all, I just can’t resist them. The leafy beauty and the promise of steamy pot likker and spicy flavor just beckons me. I had a big bunch and started thinking about my grandmother and leafed through the cookbook my cousin Amy made with all her recipes, and settled on trying out her turnip greens with cornmeal dumplings. I’d never made them before, but the idea of greens with some version of cornmeal as dumplings made my mouth water. What followed was a three week crusade to figure out how to create dumplings that didn’t melt into nothingness but instead were chewy, comforting and wonderful. What ended was a series of phone calls to my aunt and cousins about our lovely grandmother and her recipe, lots of sort-of-ok dumplings,  and then finally, a darn good recipe that DEINITELY was worth sharing with all of you lovely folks.
BUT, before I get to that, I wanted to live up to my New Year’s blog resolution to “give credit where credit is due.” I’ll spare you the sermon, but I can’t cook greens and pot likker without remembering that SO MUCH of the south’s incredible culinary heritage came from former enslaved Americans, and this dish almost certainly originated when black cooks, trying to feed their families, reserved the deliciousness and nutrient-rich broth after cooking the greens for their masters. This is just the tip of the iceberg, but I do want to, as an Atlantic writer wrote in an article, raise “a shot glass of [pot likker] in a respectful toast to the slave cooks who did the unglamorous work. They developed the roots of African-American eating the rest of us get to enjoy today.” If you want to know more, DEFINITELY check out Michael Twiddy’s blog about southern food and it’s roots Afroculinaria. It’s full of history, and food, and connections that are important and sometimes hard to hear. His work is so integral to our southern culture, he should be a Macarthur Genius Fellow, in my humble opinion.

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Hot Fruit, OR Why Brunch Food Should Be Made a Week in Advance.

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My friend Matty & his wife Suzette live in a precious Mississippi Delta town called Cleveland, home to Delta State University and probably fifteen-thousand people. They’re entrepreneurs, and advocates for education and the community, and generally all-around fun people. They LOVE Cleveland, but Matty’s one complaint (until a year or so ago) was that if you wanted brunch on a weekend, you had to drive 2 hours to Memphis or Jackson. Let’s be honest here.. no matter how awesome a rural community’s food culture is, brunch is the ONE meal that small town versions of dives, restaurants, and clubs just CAN’T often compete with their big-city counterparts…even in the south. Which means that if you live in a smaller town, and like to entertain, hosting a brunch for your friends rather than a dinner party is always a super great idea. Still not sure? Let me sell you…

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Biscuit Quest Concluded! Perfect Flaky, Fluffy Buttermilk Biscuits

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Oh my gosh, y’all. It’s over. Our search for the perfect biscuit is OVER. Thanks to a recipe my mama had been keeping for at least eight years from Southern Living Magazine titled “Our Best Ever Buttermilk Biscuit recipe” we now have EXACTLY the recipe–and most importantly, the technique–to make the fluffy, flaky biscuits we’ve been dreaming of. These cook beautifully RIGHT after the dough is made and also freeze for a few days and bake perfectly… truly, it seems like a dream (especially when you see the ingredient list) but we’ve actually, honest-to-goodness hit the brakfast/brunch jackpot! (but pay attention…technique is critical here.)

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