ON THIS WEEK’S episode of Dinner SOS, Test Kitchen director and host Chris Morocco is joined by Test Kitchen editor Kendra Vaculin to help Natalie on her journey of going past salads and embracing the wider world of leafy greens.
Natalie and her husband are well versed in the kitchen yet are stumped on creative ways to use hearty greens like kale, chard, spinach, and collard greens. Enter Chris and Kendra to the chat, where they each advocate for their own favorite greens and make a case for the recipes that won’t leave you feeling betrayed by a sad pot of watery (or tough) kale. They explore where leafy greens can be the foundation for an entire dish or meal, not just a side. Luckily, Natalie is up for the challenge!
Chris tries to sell Natalie on Charred Kale with Citrus and Green Tahini, while Kendra pushes her Mostly Chard Tiny Pasta Salad. They also recommend Kendra’s Salmon Rice Bowl With Green Curry Creamed Spinach.
Listen now to hear if Natalie’s relationship with leafy greens can evolve with Chris and Kendra’s guidance!
Chris Morocco: Hey there, listeners, future callers and cooking enthusiasts. Welcome to Dinner SOS, the show where we help you save dinner or whatever you're cooking. I'm Chris Morocco, Food Director of Bon Appetit and Epicurious. Our caller this week is Natalie. Natalie and her husband are prolific and capable cooks, and like all of us, they have their weeknight go-tos.
Natalie: We eat a lot of vegetables. We try to eat vegetarian twice a week for dinners, at least, and I think we do a pretty good job about incorporating cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower. We probably could stand to do more squashes, but zucchini makes a regular rotation, like root vegetables, but we don't do a ton of, outside of salads, leafy greens, and so I was really hoping to maybe get some, put some air quotes around it, "healthier" recipes that meaningfully incorporate leafy greens, ideally where the greens are cooked. We can certainly saute some greens with some garlic and just add that to whatever we're eating, and that's totally fine sometimes, but it's not maybe the most exciting way to leverage leafy greens.
CM: Yeah, yeah. What is a leafy green to you?
N: I mentioned we do cook cabbage a decent amount, both green cabbage, red cabbage, and then napa cabbage, but like kale, I'm thinking like spinach, but also we are fortunate to be close to several Asian and international markets, so like bok choy for example, or mustard greens, collards, things like that, I think I would particularly be interested in being able to incorporate in a meaningful way.
CM: Yeah, absolutely. Oh, interesting. You're very lucky to have that kind of resource near you.
N: We're super lucky.
CM: Because, trust me, I love broccoli. I love broccoli rabe, I love broccolini. I like kale fine. Fine. But you just get sick of seeing the same stuff. It's like, give me the mustard greens. Give me something that I just haven't seen before. There's such a range of things to consider, and this is an interesting kind of world to explore in terms of where do leafy greens intersect with cooked preparations, and how does that get you to dinner? And there's definitely some great stuff there, and this is going to be fun to explore together.
N: Oh, I'm excited.
CM: When Test Kitchen editor, Kendra Vaculin thinks of leafy greens, her brain goes to one very particular place.
Kendra Vaculin: I'm immediately awash with visions of dinosaur kale.
CM: Okay, dinosaur kale.
KV: Yeah.
CM: Aka cavolo nero.
KV: Tuscan kale-
CM: Lacinato.
KV: All the things it's called. Yeah, exactly. That's my guy. Whenever a recipe calls for a leafy green of choice, that's where I go.
CM: Oh, really? Okay. You know when kale sometimes it just wants to get tough before it gets tender, and you're in the zero-sum game of, well, now I'm adding water, now I'm adding liquid. That's getting cooked out. It's still not tender. What is happening?
KV: Why is it betraying me in this way?
CM: Have you ever been there?
KV: Absolutely. I think it's scary to people because it can go awry. It can just turn into-
CM: Leather strips.
KV: -floppy nothing.
CM: Floppy, leathery strips of kale nothing.
KV: Hard to chew, and then now it's not delightful to eat. Even if it's well seasoned, even if it's got enough fat on there, you're like, it's squeaky between your teeth. It can be bad. But I also think people shy away from the leafy green because they think the sauteed olive oil and salt version is all they can have and stuff. It goes wrong sometimes, and then they're like, well-
CM: We're stuck.
KV: -that's all I got.
CM: How come when I say leafy greens, you don't go right to romaine?
KV: I think to me, because I'm interpreting through the lens of where I see the phrase leafy green in a recipe, it often is cooked. It's often wilted down or heated in some capacity, so while you can cook romaine, it's not my favorite way to eat it, so I think I'm going for greens that behave better in the soup, by chance.
CM: That works. No, I think you're absolutely on the right track, and so it's probably not a surprise when I say that our caller, Natalie, wants help getting more leafy greens onto her plate, and it's exactly the stuff that you're mentioning.
KV: Okay, great.
CM: Right, it's the non-lettices. So Natalie and her husband-
I brought Kendra up to speed on Natalie's eating and cooking habits, and her stocked pantry, and we came up with a plan. We'd each pick a couple of greens and try to sell Natalie on a recipe that uses them.
KV: Okay.
CM: Do you want to go first?
KV: Yes, I will take rainbow chard.
CM: What? That's your first move?
KV: It's because I know what I'm going to do with it.
CM: What?
KV: I have a secret plan already.
CM: Chard is Kendra. Okay, I'm jotting this down. Wait, really? You're ready to take a culinary bullet for rainbow chard?
KV: Here's why: you get two stuff. You get two stuff out of that. You get leaf, you get stem.
CM: You get stem.
KV: And you can do fun stuff with stem.
CM:It's intriguing logic. I'll give you that.
KV: I really like it.
CM: I'm going to grab kale.
KV: Then I'm going to take spinach as my secondary easy pick.
CM: Spinach.
KV: And I mean mature spinach.
CM: I think all spinach should be mature. I think it's a shame that things like Bloomsdale spinach, Malabar spinach, that these are not household names that we just toss around casually. Because mature spinach and the way that you use it, the way that it presents itself, the texture it achieves, it's just so far superior.
KV: Yeah, for sure.
CM: So you've got spinach. I've got to get collards, then.
Collards are... That for me is like collards would never humiliate me.
KV: No, no.
CM: They would never ruin my night.
KV: They bend to your whim.
CM: They play ball.
KV: Yeah.
CM: Yeah, collards, get it done. I'm going to give you one more wild card entry for you to determine.
KV: It's not going to be escarole, because I hate escarole.
CM: Do you?
KV: Yeah, I really do. To me it's the same as cooked lettuce. It is just so strange. So you can take that if you want it. What's another leafy green that I could take?
CM: Oh, oh, could be mustard greens.
KV: Could be mustard greens.
CM: You could have a wild card entry for a frozen green, which I think the use cases of which are vastly different.
KV: Yes. I will take frozen spinach.
CM: Spinach?
KV: So I'll take fresh spinach and frozen spinach. It's like it's one thing, but two different applications.
Wow, it's so fun. I almost never am here at this juncture knowing exactly what I'm going to bring to this time, but I already know.
CM: It's fun.
We're going to take a short break. When we get back, Kendra and I get Natalie back on the line to sell her on our greens.
Hi Natalie. Welcome back.
N: It's nice to speak with you again.
CM: How's everything been in Chicago?
N: It's been extremely cold, but other than that, it's good.
CM: I'm joined here by my colleague Kendra not a fan of escarole Vaculin. Hey Kendra. How's everything going?
KV: I am doing well. I should never have told you my feelings about escarole. I feel you're going to hold them against me for as long as I live.
CM: It's okay. Nobody needs to die on a hill of escarole, but I did want Kendra in on this conversation because, unless I'm very much mistaken, you like most every other green.
KV: Oh, for sure. I love a green. I love a leafy green. It's very central to my diet.
CM: Natalie, we divvied up the world of greens, and we're going to give you some recipes using those greens, and we wanted to just basically give you a starting point for how to treat each one. So Kendra, what greens did you take? It was like that thing in gym class, like count off 1, 2, 1, 2.
KV: Totally. We were picking teams here, and my two secretly, three, greens that I got were spinach, both fresh and frozen, because their applications are slightly different as well as rainbow chard. I actually chose rainbow chard first and Chris was flabbergasted that of all the... I got first pick and I chose rainbow chard and he really thought that that was something else.
CM: I audibly guffawed, like there's no other expression for the sound effect that came out of me in that moment.
N: I was going to say, what's wrong with rainbow chard? I like rainbow chard.
KV: I know. Chris is on one, but don't worry. You and me, we're going to get through this together.
CM: That's why Kendra is here.
KV: So here are the recipes that I chose for you.
CM: Yeah, get into it.
KV: There's three. First, for fresh spinach, we have this really great recipe on the site called tortellini soup with spinach and dill. It is a Sarah Jampel recipe from a while back, and it involves a bunch of mature spinach. So rather than your clamshell of baby spinach that you might encounter in the grocery store, you are going to want to look near the big heads of lettuce and bunches of broccoli, etc, for a bunch, with the little rubber band around it or twisty tie, for mature spinach. So the leaves are bigger, they're a little less sweet, a little more earthy in flavor. You can trim the bottoms of the stems off where they get a little gross at the base, but you've got these really big, robust leaves, which I think are just leaps and bounds better than the baby spinach stuff.
CM: It's almost a different vegetable.
KV: Totally. If you're making a salad, I think mature spinach is always better. If you're cooking it down, we'll get to that, but I usually like to do frozen spinach there because a lot of the work has been done for you. For this recipe, you're basically just getting this spinach wilted into the base of this tortellini soup and you're using frozen tortellini from store-bought, and because the spinach is so hearty, you don't have to do any pre-blanching whatever, it just goes into the base of the soup itself to wilt down. And that creates a much more robust leafy green bite in the soup, as opposed to if you used baby spinach there, it would kind of just flop down into nothingness goop. But the mature spinach can really hold its own, almost like if you wilted kale into something, it behaves much more like that. So I love this soup. It's really bright, it's really fun and it's really fast because you're using that tortellini that is already made for you. It has so few ingredients, but the payoff is massive.
CM: What's the broth?
KV: You start with vegetable bouillon.
CM: Oh, wow.
KV: Or you can use vegetable stock or any sort of veggie broth from a box, but her recipe starts with a Better Than Bouillon veggie paste.
N: Oh, I have that in my fridge right now, so that sounds good.
CM: Nice.
N: So good.
KV: And the other thing that's really nice is it includes egg. There's some beaten egg which creates this really luscious, velvety broth that everything is swimming in. Really delicious.
CM: Kind of in the style of an avgolemono?
KV: Yeah, definitely. My frozen spinach recipe, I am not ashamed to tell you, I developed, and it is one of my favorites that I've done here. It is a salmon rice bowl, but on the side or beneath your salmon and rice is green curry creamed spinach. So the creamed spinach vibe, which you might be familiar with from steak houses and/or steakhouse related media, it looks goopy, it looks bad, it looks like wilty, sad greens floating in dairy in an unappetizing way. But creamed spinach done well is actually so delicious, so rich, so fantastic. Feels more like you're eating mashed potatoes than you're eating a salad. It's closer to that end of the spectrum, I think, in terms of indulgence.
And this version, in with the cream is a little bit of green curry paste, which I think just adds this extra layer of flavor and you don't have to do a lot of work because the paste just comes out of a jar. But if you cut your spinach fine enough, which is why I like using frozen chopped spinach, in the bag, it's already chopped, that fine chop really makes the eating experience much better. Really just leaf and dairy is one, and here it's leaf and curry paste and dairy is one, and it's such a delightful thing. So whether or not you make the full rice bowl is immaterial, but I think if you make this side dish, like this one component, you'll find you'll make it again and again.
CM: And the value of frozen spinach, whether it's the loose frozen spinach in the bag that's pre-chopped, which Kendra just mentioned, or it's the brick, the density of fresh spinach that you would have to start with in your kitchen to get a comparable block of blanched, squeezed out spinach, it would literally be pounds, practically.
N: Yeah, it'd be like a cauldron's worth.
KV: A hundred percent, truly. So much fresh spinach done for you, cooked down and compressed for you. And then finally-
CM: Wild card.
KV: Yeah, my rainbow chard. This is a dish that I developed two summers ago that is called mostly chard, tiny pasta salad. That is what it's called, mostly chard, and that's because it is.
CM: I forgot about that one.
KV: It's primarily chard, and the way-
CM: With the ditalini?
KV: Yes, exactly. So I love a tiny pasta. I love a tiny pasta in all applications, but in particular pasta salad. I think when a pasta is small and bitsy, the same size as maybe a bean or a chickpea would be, it makes eating a pasta salad so much more delightful. When you get a big, cold rigatoni in the middle of your pasta salad, that's a bummer. Yeah, bad. So this is tiny pasta and it is paired with the rainbow chard, and I like using rainbow because of the colors. I like it. You're separating it into two components.
You're going to thinly slice your stems and sizzle them in a lot of olive oil, and then separately you're going to chop your leaves, which then get folded in and wilted down. The stems become truly like the highlight of this dish. Every time you get it, they're like this salty, crispy, sizzled-out little something, tastes like olive oil and gorgeousness. It's so nice in every bite and it provides a little bit of color. I love when the stems are red and ribbed and robust, delightful. And then the leaves are there for health and greens and vibes. I think together, it makes the case for buying a bunch of chard, this recipe, and using every last piece of it.
CM: I do think it's really compelling the way chard, the stems are such an important element of that ingredient, so dividing them up and really getting the most out of both of those components of the chard, I'm with you there. All of these were main courses.
KV: For sure, because I think we very often relegate greens to side-dish territory, and it is true that the green curry, the creamed spinach, is a side dish that you could use anywhere. Here, it's incorporated into a salmon bowl, but I think greens have the capacity to anchor your whole meal if used properly.
CM: Natalie, how's this sounding? Any questions about those?
N: It all sounds really good. I don't know if I've ever used frozen spinach, so I'm actually quite excited to try that recipe. Because to your point, and usually when we get spinach we get the baby spinach, which also has a very rapid shelf life, and I'm sure we've all had baby spinach in the fridge and you open it thinking I'm going to use it tonight, two days after maybe I originally planned, and it's just like a swamp.
KV: Slime. It's just horrible.
N: Obviously with frozen that is not an issue.
KV: Great. Love it.
N: I did have a question.
KV: Yeah, hit me.
N: With the frozen spinach curry dish, is there the possibility of swapping out a heavy cream with coconut milk?
KV: A hundred percent.
N: I can do dairy, I just need to take lactate. So I can do both options, but I was just curious.
KV: You can a hundred percent do coconut milk there. I think that makes a lot of sense flavor-wise, and would make that a really versatile side dish for a lot of different kinds of things.
CM: Absolutely. That's a great question.
KV: Chris, what greens did you have? I don't even remember.
CM: They were so inconsequential.
KV: I was like, whatever.
CM: I can't even bring it to mind.
KV: You didn't have spinach or chard, so I don't care.
CM: So my greens were kale and collards, and I'm going to start with collards, because I think collards for me are the ideal green. What I wanted to suggest is a recipe I did called garlic and Parmesan braised collard greens, or just greens, because this recipe will use either collards or kale. It's a halved head of garlic, sweated out, light golden brown, with onion sweated around it, and then a broth with Parmesan sprinkled in and collard greens wilted down into it. And it's super simple, and part of why I wanted to suggest this, even though it's not a main course in and of itself, is I think often in the past when I've thought about how do I create a really quick, compelling soup or stew, I'm often starting with something like the protein or let's say like a can of beans. Whereas this recipe, if you started with this super flavorful, allium-heavy broth with Parmesan in there for a nice seasoning and full-on salty flavor, you could throw a can of beans or simmer some pieces of chicken or a tofu right in there and have something really full-on flavorful, and it's pretty fast.
The next one that I wanted to suggest to you, this came to mind, particularly as it pertains to kale being a little bit of a tough nut to crack sometimes. The recipe's called charred kale with citrus and green tahini, and it uses just a fast char in almost a dry skillet to just quickly temper that raw, squeaky, vegetal edge of kale leaves. But then it pairs it with really punchy citrus, whatever you have on hand, whether that's grapefruit or oranges or tangerines, etc. And then a blender tahini dressing that's got seasoned vinegar, olive oil, water and garlic in it, and then cilantro, just tons of cilantro pureed right into it. And again, this is kind of a dinner salad, but that could take a chickpea or a bean strewn across it, any other leftover cooked protein you might have on hand.
KV: That's such a good one. I really love that one.
CM: Fun. Natalie, did we lose you?
N: No, this all sounds really lovely. The green tahini dressing sounds really good, and I can definitely see it with a nice piece of fish on top and then it's a really filling meal. I was kind of surprised to hear the collards, you said it's a pretty quick meal or a pretty quick preparation, because I do feel like traditionally you're supposed to cook collards forever.
CM: Oh, collards are one of those things. They're almost to me more like a green bean, where you can have an al dente green bean or you have a green bean that is cooked to oblivion and it's still great. So collards, I think they can go to that more extreme end of cook time and still have a lot to recommend them, but honestly I found 15, 20 minutes max here.
N: Oh, that's not bad at all.
KV: I think that collards maybe need some new PR because I also had the idea that southern style with a ham hock, whatever, it requires 12 hours of your time. It's just slowly bubbling on your back burner of your stove all day long. For some reason I was like, yes, it's because they're so deeply fibrous and need that long in order to become edible, even. But that's not the case. It's just a style of preparation. I really had to be changed on this way of thinking, and now 15 minutes is like, you can get as much flavor as the long game in just a really concentrated period of time if you have those added flavor boosters like Parmesan and garlic.
CM: As you can see, we're both people maybe who fall on different sides of the green coin in terms of what our preferred greens are, but I think we are united in asserting that greens can absolutely be the engine that powers your meal, and are worthy of celebrating in their own right.
KV: A hundred percent.
CM: Not as a compliment or afterthought.
N: Yeah, I appreciate the recipes. They're all kind of different, but they also feel very riffable as well. So I'm very excited.
CM: So we sent Natalie off to contemplate all the ways she can get cooked greens into her repertoire. After another break, we'll hear what she made and how it went.
Hey Natalie, how are you?
N: I'm doing good.
CM: I am joined once more by Kendra not a fan of escarole Vaculin.
KV: Oh my gosh.
CM: How are you doing?
KV: Is that going on my tombstone now?
CM: It might, depending on how much room you leave for me.
KV: I am well, thanks. How are you?
CM: Excellent. Natalie, when we last spoke we gave you impassioned pitches for so many of our favorite greens recipes, but I want to get right into it. What did you ultimately make?
N: So I ended up picking two of the recipes, but I actually ended up making three, so I did a bonus as well. If I had more time, I think I would've made all of them. They all sounded really great. But I started with the salmon rice bowl with green curry spinach, and then I also did the charred kale with green tahini. And then my bonus recipe, I ended up making the mostly chard, tiny pasta salad because that one just sounded really good and I wanted to do that one, too.
CM: I love that recipe name. Go us.
KV: It's a fun one, I know.
N: Yeah.
CM: Let's take it from the top. The green curry cream spinach with salmon. What made you want to make this one?
N: It was honestly to try using frozen spinach. I've never bought it or used it, but we also like green curry, we like salmon. So checked all the boxes, this recipe.
CM: So tell me, any hurdles with the recipe?
N: No, although I will flag, I almost did get lazy and not squeeze the spinach out in a clean dish towel. I remember looking at the recipe, I'm like, do I really want to do that? And I'm very glad I did because when I was squeezing it, I'm like, oh, this is so much liquid. I think that would've been a humongous error not to do that. And so I followed the recipe from that perspective. Again, very glad I did. And then I swapped out, instead of using cream, we used coconut milk. And it turned out really fantastic, very good flavor. I think the crispy onions were a really fantastic textural element, and I will say I'm a convert. I have more frozen spinach in our freezer as we speak, and I'm going to use it for another meal later this week.
KV: I'm so glad.
N: We loved it.
KV: I'm so, so glad. This is such a good entry point. And I do think there are some recipes where that squeezing out portion is like you could skip it. There are some places where, if you're going to dump this spinach into a Dutch oven and cook it down with a bunch of stuff, you could definitely skip it. But I think this is an instance where you were right to go with what the recipe said, just because you're adding in the liquid in the form of that coconut milk or the cream, so you want to get rid of all the water and keep it a speedy process.
But just to say, you won't have to be dirtying or greenifying your kitchen towels every time you use frozen spinach. There are many opportunities to use it where you can just throw the frozen bag, straight from frozen right into the pot. If you like saag paneer, which is one of my favorite uses for frozen spinach, I will throw that into... I'll saute out aromatics like onion, garlic, and ginger in a pot, and then I'll throw my frozen spinach in right from frozen. Even if it's the brick, I'll just plop that right into the Dutch oven, and then pour some water over it and add all my spices, and then stick my immersion blender in there and blend it up. And that is no worse for the wear for having not been thawed and not been squeezed.
CM: And so the reason you're squeezing here, Kendra, is because you are prioritizing speed, and you didn't want to dilute the cream and have to cook it out that much longer-
KV: Correct, yeah.
CM: -to achieve an ultimately creamy consistency-
KV: Exactly.
CM: -for the spinach.
KV: If you were to not squeeze here, you would still get to where you needed to go. It would just take significantly longer because you're starting with a much wetter product. You'd have to cook out all that liquid first before then you add in your creamy element. Otherwise, you're just going to end up with a very soupy creamed spinach, half water, half coconut milk or whatever. And that might not be what you're looking for. In some cases, maybe it is what you're looking for. Cooking is fun that way. It's in the eye of the beholder and the stomach of the eater.
CM: Ultimately, yes. Fantastic. Charred kale with citrus and green tahini. How was this?
N: Really love this one as well. I think both my husband and I really liked that charred flavor that we got on the kale. I kind of reminded us of, back in pre-pandemic days we had a CSA where we went through too much kale, but we made kale chips forever. So many kale chips. But it was that lovely flavor, but it was a lot faster. And when I made the green tahini dressing, the person who delivered the groceries maybe didn't know the difference between cilantro, which I think the recipe calls for, and parsley. But we just went with it and it was great.
CM: Yeah, indeed.
N: And since we were already riffing, we added a little bit of mint, fresh mint, and it was really, really tasty. Loved it. I'm going to make the sauce again. Maybe I'll try it with actual cilantro next time. But it was really tasty.
CM: Parsley to me, it's just a little bit of that cut grass thing. It's clean and it's vegetal, but it doesn't do anything more than just be fresh and kind of there. Whereas cilantro for me just has a lot more going on aromatically, but that's so fun. What made you go with this one over some of the other awesome recommendations we had?
N: I think maybe a little bit of it is we haven't cooked any kale in a really long time, again since we stopped doing that CSA, so it was nice to revisit kale, and this one felt like... The salmon rice bowl with green curry spinach was a meal in and of itself. This one felt like a really good option to add to a larger meal that I was preparing, which is what I ended up doing.
CM: What did you do?
N: I served it alongside some lamb koftas that I made and then I also made some homemade pita, so it was a really fantastic meal altogether.
CM: We see the photo. Damn, this looks so good.
You made that pita?
N: I did. And it puffed up.
CM: No, you can tell. Look at those pleasantly dimpled-
N: Yeah, I was really happy.
CM: -ruffly edges. You can just sense the volume as they leap off of your surface.
KV: I'm coming over for dinner.
CM: I'm not even the biggest lamb person. I'd eat that lamb.
KV: That looks so good.
CM: A hundred percent. That deep, burnished sear the koftas that you created. Oh, wow. Bonus: mostly tiny pasta. Wait, mostly chard tiny pasta salad. I knew I was forgetting a word in there. Talk to us about this recipe.
N: This one was super quick and easy. I think maybe the most time-consuming thing was just chopping the chard, which again didn't take that long. And I find meal prep and chopping to be really cathartic and relaxing, so I do not mind it at all.
KV: Nice.
N: But it was really flavorful. I do think I added maybe accidentally double the chili flakes, but we're into spicy food and it was really great. So we were totally into it, but it had so much flavor, and it was a really fast dinner, a very good weeknight dinner. We added some chickpeas for protein to really round it out into a full meal. We'll definitely make this again. It was fantastic.
KV: That's such a smart addition. I think a pasta salad with a bean element is always a huge win for me, and I think that's a really smart way to go with chickpeas.
CM: You could even throw those chick- I don't know when you incorporated them into the recipe, but I'm feeling you could incorporate them around the time that you're cooking out the chard ribs, just to cook them out, get a little bit of seasoning flavor in them, maybe concentrate them a little bit.
N: Yeah, actually that I think is when I added them. So you were just-
CM: She's a natural.
N: -in the kitchen With me cooking.
CM: Love that. So these feel like some pretty significant successes, but Kendra, what do you think? How did Natalie do?
Kendra Vaculin: You did amazingly. I am so proud. When I heard that you made two, I was already like, okay, okay, overachiever, and then you were like, and secretly I made three. It's like, okay, work. I love it. And you picked some really, really fun ones that I think show the diversity of what greens can do for you, and the ways in which you can incorporate them into your meals in different ways, like as the basis of a meal in and of itself, as a plus one component to a protein, something that you can eat hot or cold or room temperature, like a pasta salad. I think you really nailed the brief in terms of expanding your greens horizons.
N: Thank you.
CM: Natalie, how is your relationship with the leafier side of the plant kingdom feeling right now?
N: So much better. I feel like previously I was scratching my head of how do I incorporate this healthy thing into some of my dinners. And Kendra, to your point, it feels like I just have a lot of different options now that I can riff off of. And I honestly do feel like the biggest win was frozen spinach. Amazing. Will be doing this in the future, and it's also just so nice because you can have it in your freezer for a while and if you don't get to it that week, it's not going to turn into a clam shell of slime.
CM: What is the next green or preparation on your list?
N: Well, the next screen that's immediately this week is going to be some more frozen spinach, like a cannellini bean, saucy dish with tomato and more feta that I'll serve with some sourdough. I think probably, if we're talking about actual vegetable, like different vegetable, probably something with collards. So I'll be looking at the recipe that you sent over for that as well.
CM: Oh, fantastic. Yeah, one of my absolute favorite grains to cook. I think they can do it all. So yeah, good luck with that. I'm honestly so happy for you. Two dedicated people who really want to eat greens, you can really make them the star of the show in a lot of ways and they will do so much for you. And wow, it's like so many dishes can just take so much of them.
KV: Yeah, I'm almost like, should you rejoin the CSA? Now you're armed with all these amazing ideas, I think you could handle it.
N: I think so.
CM: If you have a dinner emergency on your hands, write to us at podcasts@bonappetite.com, or leave us a voice message at (212) 286 SOS 1. That's (212) 286 707 1. We'd love to feature your question on the show. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a rating and review on your podcast app of choice, and hit that follow button so you never miss an episode. You can find the recipes mentioned on today's episode linked in our show notes and on the Epicurious app, brought to you by Condé Nast. Just search Epicurious in the app store and download today. And if you're not yet a subscriber, you can sign up today for a 30-day free trial in the app or at bonappetite.com.
Thanks for listening to Dinner SOS. I'm your host, Chris Morocco. My co-host this week is Kendra Vaculin. Our senior producer is Michele O'Brien. Peyton Hayes is our associate producer. Research editing by Marissa Wolkenberg. Jake Lummus is our studio engineer. This episode was mixed by Amar Lal at Macro Sound. Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Chris Bannon is Condé Nast's Head of Global Audio. Next week, Kendra is back to tackle the question of hosting, and we'll see if she can menu plan on the spot for our listeners' upcoming dinner parties.
KV: They were like, do you want to see the questions in advance? And I was like, no, I'll do this on the fly. And now I'm like, oh my God. It's going to be great. It's going to be great. I'm so excited.