Week 1: Mustard Greens, Kale, Cornbread & Chicken

Monday was really hectic and we ate something like cardboard for dinner because we had to be at a speech appointment at 6pm. Tuesday welcomed a completely horrible work day and I knew that having all those veggies aging by the hour in my fridge was only going to make me panicky. So upon arriving home from work at 3:30, I squelched my motherly guilt over leaving my kids in childcare, popped open a bottle of wine and began chopping. As I was mourning the loss of what could have been a perfectly decent Tuesday, I was distracted by the extreme health of the green onions. Like no spring onion I've seen before, the white bottoms were gleaming like a force of nature, while the green tubes were strong, thick and crisp. The fact that there was something so utterly perfect before my eyes dissipated my bad mood. Before I knew it, I had multi-tasked my way to the following:

Green onion and blue cheese cornbread

Green onion/zuccini pancakes (for the following night's meal)

Braised mustard greens and kale (and, of course, the remaining green onions)

Because the rest of my family is carnivorous, I also picked up a (free range, naturally raised, blah blah) rotisserie chicken from Whole Foods. All in all, I spent about 1-1/2 hours chopping, cooking and cleaning up before picking up the kids (slightly mortified that the teacher might smell the one glass of wine on my breath and declare me an unfit mother). The kids loved the cornbread and chicken, but the greens were an absolute no-can-do. They wouldn't touch them. But that's okay because in that one meal, the hubby and I scarfed down two batches of mustard greens and a large batch of kale. I couldn't believe how great they were. I was expecting the stems to be tough, the leaves to be soggy, and my outlook on the whole CSA thing to be a bit tough and soggy as well. I've never been so happy to be wrong. The hubby was convinced I'd drunk the whole bottle of wine because I literally couldn't stop talking about how amazing the greens were, my dismay at how amazing the greens were, how beautiful the greens were... You get the point. My vegetables saved me that day, saved me from what would have ordinarily been an I'm-too-stressed-out-to-cook-let's-eat-cereal-for-dinner kind of day, and for that I was grateful. But let's face it, if given the choice between chicken, sketchy greens and cornbread for dinner OR crispy, processed cereal floating in milk turning various shades of food dye, the kids would have opted for the cereal.