Can’t get excited about kale? Carrots leave you cold?
Yes, leafy green and yellow vegetables are about as exciting as a rerun on C-SPAN.
But you really should eat at least one serving daily. They’re the only group of vegetables singled out by nutritionists as crucial to your health.
Collard greens, Swiss chard, spinach, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, winter squash and other dark green, orange and deep yellow vegetables are packed with potent nutrients.
Baked sweet potatoes and spinach salad get old after a while though. So do baby raw carrots. And pureed squash? It tastes like baby food.
There’s got to be a way to make this good-for-you stuff taste good, we figured. We were right. After a week of fiddling with kale and cubing squash, we came up with recipes for the three soups printed on this page that taste wonderful and give you all the beta carotene you need.
Beta carotene is the substance in leafy green and yellow vegetables that the human body turns into vitamin A. A 1992 report by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that foods high in beta carotene may help reduce the risk of certain types of cancer. Researchers also believe beta carotene may help prevent heart disease.
Don’t expect beta carotene pills do the job. There are dozens of carotenes besides beta carotene, and they are thought to work in concert to prevent disease. The only way to be sure you are getting the right combination is to consume them in food.
“At least get in one serving (a day),” urges Evelyn Taylor, manager of the program for nutrition intervention at the University of Akron.
One serving is about a half-cup, and you will get at least that amount in a bowl of these soups:
– Sweet potato and bacon: a creamy, smooth soup studded with bacon bits and wilted spinach, and seasoned with a bit of cumin and coriander.
– Bean and Swiss chard: a hearty, full-flavored soup of white beans, chard and diced carrots seasoned with garlic and oregano and garnished with slivers of Parmesan cheese.
– Leafy green and yellow vegetable soup: chunky with beef, potatoes, green beans, cubed butternut squash, corn and chopped kale, and livened up with Dijon mustard, dill and plum tomatoes.
The sweet potato soup goes together quickly, but the other two are the kind of long-simmered soups that warm the house on a cold winter day.
To make the soups, you have to know a few things about greens and squash, such as how to clean and peel them. If you have ever tried to peel a raw butternut squash, you have faced adversity. The knife blade goes in, the tough skin resists and you barely miss slicing off your finger.
The only easy way to peel tough-skinned winter squash is with a very sharp potato peeler. Buy a new one if yours is old and dull–it is well worth the modest price. It may take a couple of swipes to peel off a swath of skin, but the work goes quickly.
The butternut squash in our vegetable soup is a deep yellow-orange. The vivid color and sweet flavor add immeasurably to the soup.
Now, on to greens. They come in two textures–tender and tough. Tender greens such as spinach and young chard can go right into the pot after washing. Tough greens such as kale must be destemmed first.
To remove the stems, fold a big leaf in half on a cutting board. The stem will then be perfectly exposed. Slice it off (way up into the leaf) with a chef’s knife. The leaves are large and relatively few in a bunch, so the task isn’t daunting. Be sure to clean all greens well under running water to remove soil and sand.
Our recipes call for cutting the chard and spinach into a chiffonade, or thin ribbons. If you do this leaf by leaf, you will still be at it when baseball season starts. The way to slice greens quickly is to gather a handful into a tight bundle on a cutting board. Holding the bundle somewhat together with one hand, slice the bundle with the other as you would a tomato or a loaf of bread.
Spinach and young chard cook quickly, so they should be added to soup near the end of simmering. Kale takes at least 15 minutes to cook, so plan accordingly. Any green, even kale, can be added to stir-fries to give them a nutrition boost. In the case of kale, though, par-boil it first in boiling water for several minutes.
Once you start cooking with leafy green and yellow vegetables, you will think of other ways besides soups to sneak them into your diet.
A friend keeps frozen spinach in her freezer and adds a handful to whatever she’s cooking–meat loaf, hamburgers, spaghetti sauce, chili. Grated carrots can be used in a similar fashion.
After you taste mild-flavored chard, you’ll probably want to add it to salads. Spinach or chard, lightly stir-fried with sesame oil and garlic, is a flavorful side dish.
