Newari Greens

Please welcome our first ever guest contributor on the H.O.G. Food Blog. Our friend, Liz Lance, brought these amazing greens to our recent Thanksgiving potluck dinner:

“The dinner table at the Lance home represented a melding of regional American cuisine – the hearty German meat and potatoes of my mother’s St. Louis upbringing and the fried seafood and overcooked green vegetables of my father’s Southern Georgia ancestry. Collard greens, spinach and green beans were boiled into oblivion with salt pork, and they became dishes to be endured rather than enjoyed.

It was years before I learned that these green vegetables were so named because they were actually green. I only ever knew them as brown, mushy and utterly tasteless. Blech. But, when I moved to Nepal in my early 20s and fell in love with Nepali food, I discovered the wonder of greens. Nepalis eat the same traditional meal of dal bhat – rice, lentil soup and a vegetable curry – twice a day, every day, and always with greens, or saag. Saag is cheap, plentiful and nutritious, providing iron, calcium, folic acid and vitamin C. Most Nepali cooks will quickly fry up saag with some combination of spices and chili pepper, cooking them just long enough to wilt and so they retain their dark green color.

I took my cues for cooking saag from two Newari families from Patan, the city just south of Kathmandu. The Newars are famous for their spicy varieties of food incorporating garlic, ginger, red pepper and cumin seed, and they have an amazing ability to use the same few spices in multiple dishes without everything tasting the same. In both the Bajracharya and Khadki homes where I have enjoyed countless meals, the simple and delicious preparation of saag always kept me asking for more. Newari saag has also become my signature dish at gatherings that call for traditional greens – Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day dinners. The best part is that my favorite greens, collards, kale and mustard greens, are at their best during the winter season!

When Chef Stephen asked me to bring a low-fat, non-starchy vegetable to his and Molly’s Thanksgiving table, I jumped right in with my Newari greens. They looked beautiful plated up next to a beet salad and bright yellow delicata squash, and they even reappeared on turkey sandwiches in the days after the holiday. Here is the recipe. Enjoy!”

Newari Greens
3 bunches dark leafy greens (kale, collards or mustard greens are the tastiest!)
6 cloves garlic
3-inch long piece of ginger
3 tablespoon whole cumin seed
crushed red pepper to taste (a teaspoon to a tablespoon)
2 tablespoon canola oil
salt to taste

Grind the ginger and garlic together in a food processor, adding a pinch of salt or a splash of lemon juice to aid in the blending.After washing (well!) and rinsing the greens, cut off the thick stems. Stack ten or so leaves up, roll them up and cut them cross-wise every inch or so in a chiffonade. Repeat until all greens are chopped. Heat the canola oil over a medium-high flame until oil is hot. Add the cumin seed and fry until seeds are dark brown. Add the salt and the garlic-ginger mixture. Lower the flame to medium and add the crushed red pepper. Quickly follow with the greens, adding them in batches until they are all just wilted, but still bright green.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 at 10:21 am and is filed under Sides & Snacks , collard greens, green vegetables, newari, saag, thanksgiving christmas, thanksgiving potluck. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.