COOKING GREENS FOR A (LARGE) CROWDChef Michael Ennes cooks for a crowd daily at Broadway Community Inc. in New York. Here’s how he cooks up a large batch of greens.
Directions:
To Blanch or Not? Blanching (cook briefly in boiling water ) is required for larger, woodier, greens with thick stems and leaves, like Broccoli Rabe, and for most late season greens. For early Red Russian Kale I’d say no blanching required, as is true for young collards. But in September/October, they are big and woody.
Prepare your greens. Trim the largest and heaviest stems, especially those parts with no leaves. (If your serving raw-salad-you should always cold water wash and spin dry. If cooking it’s a good idea, but sometimes if they are young and clean, you can skip the wash.)
If blanching, bring a little more than half a large stock pot of water with a dash of salt to a rolling boil, immerse you prepped greens and cook for 2 to 5 minutes maxium depending on size. Drain, or go directly to next step, but watch the splatter when wet greens hit the hot pan.
Braise your greens. Whether you’ve blanched or not, here’s the magic: Heat a generous splash of oil (canola or vegetable, with a touch of virgin olive and/or sesame oil) in your biggest braiser (a large low pot) and add diced onions, crushed or chopped garlic, a ham hock or some smoked turkey [but then you’re not veggie] or some BBQ SAUCE and/or a drop of liquid smoke and fresh ginger, sesame seeds, pine nuts, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, chili peppers, dry rosemary, thyme, basil or sage to your taste.
When you’ve got good sizzle, or the onions are translucent, add your greens. Stir, or bring the bottom to the top with tongs, (if your doing a lot, as they shrink add more, making sure the get the new batch to the bottom of the pan) until all your greens are barely wilted, a few minutes per load.
Then add some liquid, which can be vegetable broth or water, with a little white wine, apple or white grape juice added for sweetness, and steam until tender. Just a couple of minutes for a small batch, more for big volume.
Salt to taste, add more flavors if you like, (some people like vinegar, BBQ, Tabasco, or Worcestershire sauce) and/or a topping, of croutons, nuts or seeds, and enjoy.
Michael Ennes
Bio
Raised on the upper west side of Manhattan before it was chic Michael Ennes started cooking at 18 months, in a highchair with a wooden bowl in his grandmother’s kitchen. It would be three decades and two careers later before he professionally resumed. A flirtation with academia, the ministry and teaching led him to a career as a designer/builder specializing in restaurants.
He spent time in Florida but, later returned to NYC to reunite with his college sweetheart after a quarter-century separation. He was working as a restaurant start-up specialist when he first volunteered in the soup kitchen in 2001.
It’s been a tough time for Broadway Community, which almost didn’t survive funding cuts after 9/11. But it did … and now it is an organization with two-dozen programs, aimed directly at giving people the tools they need to rebuild their lives. Chef Michael finds that more and more these days those people are families who are not the historically poor, but grew up middle class until a crisis intervened: fire, flood, layoff or disease.
The tool Chef Michael works with most is nutrition. When he came to Broadway seven years ago he didn’t know he would eventually build a new kind of food program. Broadway Community now finds that it’s developing a new model for EFP’s (Emergency Food Programs), and is on the leading edge of a national movement, building the “Healthy Community Food Program.”