Greens on the grill

Virginia was off again on a work trip to Toronto. Usually when she is here we can for the most part do a little divide and conquer with the kid’s activities. With pick up from soccer camp and race to swim team, which is 5:30 for Noah and 6:30-7:30 for Sasha, I had little time to cook. When we got home, I sent the kids up to shower and got rolling. I always think I can prep a little before, but I am usually late for a pickup or stuck on the computer doing this blog or something else. Our family has been used to this. Her job has always required some travel. Usually it is just a night or two and she is able to take ridiculous flights to get home as quickly as possible. Traveling with a breast pump in the aftermath of 9/11 and having to explain to every TSA agent why she was carrying breast milk and not a baby made it much harder on her. When the kids were little I used to mark days off on the calendar like a convict serving time. “two more nights to go…just one day more….”Bedtime in particular was tough, but now I have found that I am almost more efficient without mom. I need to be much more organized and scheduled than I do when she is here. Her deal with the kids is if she spends a night away, they get a travel gift. They used to get baseball hats or shirts, but it got very expensive with frequent trips so it evolved into a key chain or hotel paper and pen.

So back to dinner for the night. Greens on the grill are fun to make and a great quick option. It is one of the easier things to throw together since it doesn’t matter how you put them on the grates. You can use any of the hearty greens available. I have used chard, bok choy, rapini, kale and broccoli rabe. Most of the time we get great local greens and feel really lucky to get these when the other local veggies are long gone or yet to arrive in the late fall and winter. I love the rabe since it requires very little attention on the grill and it is very dramatic looking while cooking. Sometimes we prepare it Asian style, but mostly stick to the Italian flavor. Usually we put it over pasta or polenta but you can also do it over rice or as a side dish. Today, greens were the focus of our meal, and the whole dinner took about twenty minutes to make top to bottom.

I will confess to going to the local grocery store in a pinch when we run out of local stuff and it isn’t a market day. It is amazing that even in deep dark winter, our local Giant has decent looking broccoli rabe.

I usually fill up the kitchen sink with water and put in four big bunches of greens. The fun part is how obscenely huge it seems. Virginia always comments on how much it looks like before you cook it, but it always cooks down to a third of original size. Letting the dirt and sand rinse out in the bottom of the sink I give it another quick rinse. I then shake the greens to get off as much water as possible. If I am cooking it on a stove I might use a salad spinner or towel to dry it, but on the grill you can be a lot looser. The fear of splattering oil is totally avoided on the grill. I then use grape seed oil, which has a higher burn point than most other oils and lightly dress the greens. I also toss in salt and pepper. Now the fun begins. With a very high fire on the grill, I dump on all the greens. With rabe, I am talking about six inches of greens. I spread them out as best I can to maintain an even thickness and shut the top quickly. I then walk away for about five minutes and come back armed with a spatula. I then try and turn over the pile to get the now browned greens off the grates and the top greens on the bottom. This whole process takes about fifteen minutes. While the greens are unattended, I prepare my pasta or polenta or whatever else I am going to serve with them.

This time I still had some great tomatoes that were perfectly ripe from my last visit to Twin Springs so I diced them up with finely chopped scapes and added olive oil, salt, pepper and a dash of rice wine vinegar. It gives the dish some nice moisture and cool tangy taste. It is my raw tomato sauce that takes about a minute to make. With brown rice and soy macaroni and a glass Chianti for me, we had a full meal.

Virginia finished her meetings early and was able to get an early flight home. She didn’t make it home for dinner, but she was back for bedtime. I was very happy but the kids didn’t get a Blue Jays cap or even a Marriot Courtyard pen.