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Veggies Starring as....Themselves

Collards a Southerner Would Hardly Recognize

On my family’s farm in Ohio, we used to grow collard greens that we sold at a Farmer’s Market in Cleveland. Every year, my mother would ask one of our customers for advice on how to cook the greens. We would all give them a try, but I can’t say there were ever any converts. Years later, at a wine dinner in Florida, I found myself seated next to a very elegant African American woman who waxed on about the best way to cook collards.  She recommended the same slow cooked method favored by most traditionalists, but she recommended a splash of vodka and a teaspoon of vanilla be added.  I tried this approach, and I found myself still in the “unappreciative” category.  Fast forward several years, and I’ve been living and working in the Carolinas for over five years.  I regularly interact with true Southerners who really know their way around collard greens, and I’m still trying to understand what the fuss is about.

Try, no more!  I get it!  Our produce delivery from Absolute Organics included collard greens this week, and I was determined to give them a real go.  I read many, many recipes for slow cooked collard greens and couldn’t shake the notion that in this household, I’d be the only one eating them. Then, I found this recipe for Citrus Collards with Raisins. These collards are blanched (a step that helps to remove the bitter edge that some collards have) and then sautéed only briefly with garlic, raisins, and orange juice. Interesting, right?  Then, there was the last sentence of the recipe: “this also makes a tasty filling for quesadillas.”

Since I had some whole wheat tortillas and jarlsberg cheese hanging around, this seemed a perfect way to put the collards in a husband and child friendly form.  I used dried cranberries because we like them better than raisins in this house. Our citrus collard quesadillas were fabulous, except that a cheese with more punch would have been better! For my family that includes Texas natives, these are going to make a perfect day-after-Thanksgiving lunch: quesadillas with leftover turkey, citrus collards with dried cranberries, and pepper jack cheese. It will be Tex-Mex meets the South meets Thanksgiving!