Vestiges of The Depression, or, Check Under each Leaf!

I titled this post 9 months ago; if those October-harvested greens were pregnant, they would now in July be birthing a delicious very green soup that makes the youth at work shiver in fear. 

Last year, as the garden was putting on its frosty blanket and Clarabelle was obstinately wedging her growing head under my ribs, I snipped all of the leafy green pieces left in the garden and prepared them for a frosty blanket of their own.  These greens included the "mixed greens OG" we had planted from Fedco seeds as well as the greens from the fairly unproductive broccoli and the entirely unproductive cauliflower we had planted as seedlings. 

When my mother's mother, Betsy, was a girl, she and her brother Dan moved west from Kansas to California with their parents.  My great grandfather dug ditches and my great grandmother tended chickens, which all died, and goats, whose milk my grandmother and her brother refused to consume in any form.  Two generations later, I still adhere to the values that grew out of that Great Depression.  Don't toss when you can repair.  Preserve food.  Save for a rainy day.  And for the record, Andrew and I both love goat cheese.  It doesn't take a Great Depression for these values to pay off, though I'm sure that Mark wouldn't mind tossing a few of my weathered possessions  (yes babe, I'm referring to that camp sweatshirt from 3rd grade!). 

I researched all I could and never found any reassuring account of consuming broccoli leaves, but I figured it couldn't be that bad.  I plucked all the leaves before the frost could ruin them and threw them into a sink full of water to rinse the bugs and dirt.  It turned out that practicing the values of the Depression is a lot of work.  There were many bugs.  And I did indeed need to check under each leaf.  So many little caterpillars and surprises. It took much longer than I had planned and those leaves had many more hiding places than I had ever imagined.

Nine months later, Mark is not crazy about using those big bags of greens.  Apparently he takes after my grandmother.  I made a big batch of soup with a bag of the greens, courtesy of Deborah Madison.   It featured the usual suspects, evoo, onions & garlic, and was finished with a healthy dose of lemon and cream.  Mark was hungry enough to eat a small bowl for dinner. The leftovers have made for delicious lunches on these lately not-too-hot summer days, as long as I check my teeth in the mirror at work to make sure I don't have a green-specked smile. 

According to the paper I keep posted on the fridge with a list of all the freezer holds (I often forget the treasures packed away in there - tofu meatballs! black beans from scratch! homemade tomato sauce!) I have 2 more jars of the soup and 3 more bags of greens.  I'm thinking the greens will be a great addition to a lasagna and perhaps a quiche.  It looks like this summer, aside from a neverending pile of breastmilk bags, we will also be packing the freezer with lots of tomato sauce and maybe a bag or two of rhubarb.

I wonder how Clarabelle will bring these lessons into her life. My adult self never got to know my Granny, but as I try to "use it up, wear it out, make it do and do without" I feel that my foremothers are still with me.