Winter greens
Hearty leaves now in season — with a duo of dressings to help you eat them up
The farmers markets of summer get all the glory, but pound for pound, the winter markets have more guts. These off-season centers of homegrown commerce run from about Halloween through Easter and are like distillations of their summer counterparts, like some secret society for extra-cheerful and healthy people.
LocalHarvest.org provides online tools to help farmers thrive, and maintains a database of active farmers markets in the U.S. According to LocalHarvest’s Guillermo Payet, there are about 4,700 summer markets nationwide, compared with 1,911 winter markets. He recently added a winter market search feature, so shoppers can easily find the winter market closest to them.
My winter market in Montana is flush with “normal” cold weather crops like potatoes, squash, onions and garlic, as well as animal and value-added products like bacon, pickles, cheese and eggs.
But the stars of the winter market are the winter greens, that large and delicious spectrum of spinach, tatsoi, arugula, broccoli, kale and leafy cabbages like Napa. These greens, planted during the dog days of summer, came of age in cooler, shorter days.
Under these conditions, plants build themselves differently. They are smaller but sturdier, denser and crunchier. Maybe it’s the bleak context in which they appear, but winter greens emanate a vitality that you can see and taste, like earthy, bitter candies.
Here are two recipes to help you enjoy the winter greens in season today.
Crazy Mountain Blue Cheese Dressing
This recipe comes from Cheryl Marchi, proprietress of the Crazy Mountain Inn, a 117-year-old boarding house in Martinsdale, Montana, where Calamity Jane once stayed. The adjacent café is the toast of Meagher County, and where I first tasted Marchi’s blue cheese salad dressing. It’s thick enough to use as a dip, but not so thick that your shirt won’t look as splattered as mine does after dipping cauliflower florets too impatiently. Marchi likes it with oniony dishes — as a dip for onion rings or to hold the grilled onions in place on a French dip sandwich.
Yields 4½ cups
- ½ cup milk
- 3½ cups Best Foods mayo
- 6 ounces Gorgonzola
- 4 or 5 cloves of garlic, crushed
- Lots of fresh, coarsely ground black pepper
Set a third of the Gorgonzola aside. Blend everything else together. Break the unblended chunk of Gorgonzola into little chunks and stir it in. Let it sit for a bit, preferably overnight.
Flower Child Lemon Tahini Dressing
This recipe comes courtesy of Flower Child vegan restaurant chain. This sauce is an emulsion, meaning it won’t separate after you mix it up. In other words, it’s basically lemon tahini mayo, which is pretty special. If you add a yolk it will emulsify even thicker, but that of course would cause the dressing to lose its veganity.
The dressing also contains nutritional yeast, aka “Hippy Dust,” which seems appropriate for a restaurant called Flower Child. The yeast confers a meaty strength to the dressing, which isn’t surprising because Hippy Dust is 100 percent yeast meat.
If your garlic is large of clove, like mine, you might not want to use the full eight cloves called for. So use your best judgement, but no fewer than three cloves. The acid, sweetness, saltiness and richness of this dressing makes it a great blanket to a pile of earthy leaves.
Yields 1½ cups
- 8 cloves of garlic, peeled
- ½ cup fresh lemon juice
- 2½ tablespoons tahini
- 1 teaspoon whole grain mustard
- 2 teaspoons evaporated cane sugar
- 1 teaspoon kosher salt
- 1 tablespoon nutritional yeast
- ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
- ½ cup grapeseed oil
Put the first 7 ingredients in a blender and process on medium speed for 15 seconds. While machine is running, slowly pour in the oils until emulsified. Place in covered container in refrigerator until needed.
