Greens in duck broth

Seafood is not the only thing you can buy at the Saint-Aignan market on Saturday mornings. There's a cheese vendor with a wide range of French cheeses, and there's a man who sells just local goat cheese, which he makes on his farm just a mile or two from us. There's a beef butcher, a poultry butcher, and a horse butcher, and there are at least two pork butchers. And there are of course several vendors selling fresh fruits and vegetables.

Meanwhile, when it comes to winter vegetables, I've laid in our supply of one leafy green that I can't otherwise find on the markets or in the supermarkets around Saint-Aignan. It's ... guess what ... collard greens. I harvested about a bushel of big dark green leaves last week. This was my third harvest of greens since summer, if I remember correctly.

I couldn't bring myself to try to make the greens into kraut because I wasn't confident I knew how to do it. I didn't want to waste my crop. So I cooked the greens the way I usually do, with a couple of differences. In the freezer, I found a liter of liquid I'd labeled as duck broth. There was also some "pot liquor" or collard broth in a smaller container. Those two finds gave me enough liquid to cook all the collards I had harvested.

And how big was the harvest? Well, after a long slow cooking — I also added some white wine to the pot, I'll admit — I ended up with about six quarts (liters) of greens. We ate some for a couple of days. Then I put the greens up in plastic containers for the freezer. (There are enough leaves left on the plants out in the garden for another harvest, by the way — if we don't have a killing freeze any time soon.)




That gave me nine pints, or 4½ quarts of greens. I put the cooked greens in the containers and then filled them with enough of the cooking liquid to fill each container. I weighed them and each container came in between 525 and 575 grams — more than a pound. Ten pounds of greens should get us through the winter. I see cornmeal dumplings in my future.