Just a quick little weekend blurb here…
This is very simple but for some reason, maybe due to my inner Cracker Barrel, I just really love it. You couldn’t pay me to a eat a salad if these greens were sitting next to it.
To make them all I do is add a couple cups of water to a pot, 1 sliced onion per pound of dark greens (turnip greens are the best – hellfire that’s what they serve at Cracker Barrel, but this works well for collard greens and various types of kale as well as mustard greens and others), plenty of the infamous MONEY SPICE, and cook them for at least an hour at a very low simmer, if not a hair longer. This was filmed a couple of months ago and now I’m cooking them even longer!
I consume all of the greens as well as the broth which is tasty and full of minerals which I’m all about. In fact, next time I make these I’m considering using a little chicken stock instead of water and/or adding a couple ounces of powdered gelatin at the end – stirring it in until it is dissolved but not boiling the hell out of it. It could be part of my gelatinophilia experimentation. For you real rednecks (Johnny Lawrence), throw a frickin’ hambone or a couple pig’s feet up in there. Mercy.
What about pig's ears, tail, face… yum!
Heading off to look up the money spice… Back when I was eating animal products, I regularly cooked greens in the broths that I made. I recall one spring up here in AK when I pretty much lived on nettles cooked in broth for a month. I don't feel to be missing the broth part, but it definitely added a certain je ne sais quoi…
Yeah adding the bacon and broth is a nice touch. Or, take the resulting liquid and pour it into an existing broth.
Nettles. Nice. That sounds pretty hardcore. I promised myself I would gather up a bunch of nettles and cook them 476 times. Times I actually did it = ZERO
Oh, you should _totally_ try nettles. I can't believe that I was raised in a nettle-infested place and was delighted when I moved to CA and escaped them–lifelong amateur herbalist and never caught on.
In AK, though, they're the first thing that really grows in profusion after a long winter, so it's easy to get into them. Last year, I even ate quite a few raw (although I did get some stings on the tongue). Steamed, they are delicious. People say they're like spinach, but they have a much richer, deeper taste. You can make a great pesto with them too, even raw. Garlic and nettles, hmm….
My mother grew up during the Great Depression as one of 11 children. They were always hungry. Lucky for them, Clifton, NJ was mostly grazing land and meadows back then. She'd pick fresh watercress and dandelion greens (and maybe steal a tomato or two from a neighbors garden). She swears it was her earthy peasant diet that's helped her live to be 87. I dunno. I think she's just determined to outlive my father! Let me go check out your ingredients for Money Spice :-)
That looks like good stuff.
Since doing rrarf or at least following the high starch, low PUFA principles for about 8 months my skin, focus, and sleep have improved a lot. I noticed that whenever I ate a high-ish amount of flesh protein with starch my teeth felt weak so I switched to more braised meats and stocks. Since the switch my skin has cleared up even more and teeth don't have any problems.
I didn't think of using powdered gelatin. Anything I should be careful about when getting powered gelatin?
I'll probably stick to the really stuff though, I've got a pot of about 20 chicken feet, a carcass and a few trotters simmering right now.
Oh, I totally forgot to mention. One thing for me that never went completely away until recently was my dandruff (even though my hair is really thick, never greasy and no receding hairline). It lessened after rrarf and low PUFA but never subsided. But since adding stocks it literally went away over night. I remember the first day I made a conscious effort to use stock at each meal I woke up the next day virtually dandruff free.
bacon, some red wine vinegar, a bit of sugar, red pepper flakes and Frank's Red Hot to top it off at the end.
I have to try this
I've bought collared greens so many times and ended up throwing them out because I didn't know what to do with them. I'll give it another go.
I've just recently started trying to eat more leafy greens, and I've discovered that steaming kale for about 15 mins. makes it quite soft, then adding butter, salt & pepper makes it very tasty.
Also, I've been sauteeing baby spinach in the flavorless coconut oil, and with the usual salt & pepper it tastes really good to me.
Meighen
Meighen-
Yeah, flashing some baby spinach in hot oil, butter, or animal fat is a fantastic way to have it. I like mustard greens like this too.
Chris-
Great feedback. There's no question that protein is hard on the ol' teeth. The more protein you consume, the more minerals your body excretes. Mineral requirements increase as animal protein consumption increases. My teeth have been feeling amazing since cutting back on dairy, meat, etc.
Good to hear about the gelatin and dandruff. Little things like that are always big and very important clues to our overall state of health.
@Matt
It's weird that I had the opposite experience with my teeth when I increased protein.
Some people (low carbers, ray peat, maybe some others I can't remember) say protein only increases urinary mineral excretion because it increases mineral absorption. It sounds plausible, but of course they're biased.
I had many short-term improvements on low-carb with teeth, probably due to better blood sugar stability and lower blood sugar levels overall (just speculating on that, I didn't start testing blood glucose until much later).
But as time wore on, this started to fade away until I had severe tooth pain eating a ZERO sugar diet with about 15% of calories from carbs, 15% from protein, and 70% from fat.
Of course, fat has no minerals. So I can't say it was the protein. It easily could have been from displacing so many mineral-rich dietary calories with low-mineral dietary calories.
I suspect adrenal overactivity had a lot to do with it as well.
It could be that protein stabilizes blood glucose, which would explain why I had less tooth pain when I had some with my starches.
I know Peat thinks cortisol and prolactin cause bone loss and osteoporosis. Maybe protein along with the low carbohydrate intake causes hypothyroidism and inflammation, which leads to higher cortisol?
High protein and low carbohydrate diets will always increase cortisol, since cortisol is required for gluconeogenesis when the blood sugar is too low. Cortisol causes the body's protein to be broken down to convert the amino acids into glucose.
interesting about the fat having no minerals. having done high fat and moderately restricted carbs for 2 years, although i felt better in that my tooth pain disappeared and have'nt had a proper cold in nearly a year, recent pre-conception hair mineral analysis showed i am low in many minerals considered important for healthy conception.
of course a few years of breastfeeding could have contributed to this, but I do wonder about the displacing so many of the carbs with fat.
matt, if you've cut back on dairy, how do you make sure you get adequate calcium and would you agree that it is best absorbed from raw dairy products?
That nice pot of greens should have lots of good calcium
1 cup Collards has 266 mg calcium
1 cup of milk has 276 mg calcium.
I like to make them 'clean' because drinking the pot liquor is something I relish; it has a very good flavor all it's own – especially knowing it has a high vitamin and mineral content.
Up until roughly two weeks ago I have been consuming 98% of my meat raw. On a whim I decided to start heating my meat. This was met with an increase of stress that eventually evened out. All meat (turkey in particular, beef not so much) would make me have moderate panic attacks that would last for an hour or two then subside. I had tremendous energy during this period but because i couldn't concentrate wasn't of much use. I also started to lean out a bit which indicated to me that my fat to protein ratio had gone down.
I've read studies that came to the conclusion that when we cook meat we allow our bodies to utilize more of the protein available to us. My guess is that the channel of protein being digested at one time widened (like how relaxed you feel when you eat low GI starch VS high GI starch) my body just had to adjust.
Does this seem correct or is there more to it? Another possibility is that cooking might change the ratio of the various amino acids, therefor causing what protein I am digesting to be more inflammatory/stimulating.
-Anonymous
starting to sound like the warrior diet up in here… fruits during the day, hearty meals at night… minus his protein emphasis… He has the same training mentality as scott abel as well… Where is chief?
troy
Also… Ori doesn't like muscle meat as well as milk, egg, and lean fish protein, because of the anti thyroid effects. He prefers the neolithic period to the paleo period… hmmmm….
troy
Finally! After all the shout outs given to much less worthy people, I get the credit I deserve. Even if it was on a weekend filler post. Since moving to the country from Reseda I've grown to appreciate fine southern cookin. It don't git no better than ham hocks n greens.
Hold on just a sec……redneck?? Who you calling a redneck? What, you think I live in a double wide, own a 16 gauge, live in my parents backyard, and married my cousin?……………………..It's a 12 gauge you douchebag!
So apart from greens, what are you eating these days Matt?
Awesome recipe looks awesome. I've always got a bowl of money spice on the counter, I use if for everything.
I've been absent for about a month because I ahad a super stressed out time at work, which ended with me getting strep throat twice, and getting a sebacious cyst in my armpit. Total prescriptions for antiobiotics: 3.
So yeah, I can't deal with stress. So it's time for me to get serious about fixing my adrenals because I do not want another meltdown like this. Where to begin?
On the plus side the last few weeks since the only I craved was spicy food, I've been on this Indian food kick. I came across the best barbeque sauce recipe EVER, although it is called "Sweet tomato chutney" Trust me this is barbeque sauce. My kid would eat his shoe if it were dipped in this.
1 big ass can of tomatoes
1 head of garlic peeled and roughly chopped
a 3 inch chunk of ginger, peeled and roughly chopped
1 tsp of salt
1/2 cup of sugar or honey
1/2 cup of red wine vinegar
Put tomatoes in a non reactive pan (enamel coated cast iron works best) and bring them to a boil. Break em up with a wooden spoon. Meanwhile put garlic vinegar and ginger in a food processor and make a paste. Put the sugar in to the tomatoes, stir for a bit and bring back to a boil. Add the garlic paste to the tomatoes, bring to a simmer, then turn it down low and let it bubble away for a couple of hours. You can add vinegar if it starts to get to thick. Remember to add some sweetner to balance out added vinegar. It should be roughly equal volumes.
Hello people, Is there a forum/ discussion board or something I can search in and ask questions? I find this blog very interesting but also unorganized, annoyingly written and too detailed (for my interest) at times.
Don't ya love how them collards stank up the house too? Ack- I grew up with my mama working those collards in the pressure cooker and never liked them. You can have them.
However, I am currently braising some frozen spinach in some chicken stock, an onion, and some bacon. We love it with some vinegar splashed in as well.
Very informative post, great work.
Sorry Franz,
Not really. This blog has been around generating and discussing ideas for quite a while. The backlog is massive. We've pressured Matt for a forum for a long time, and he's talked about it, but I've heard others express the concern it's not the best way to convey everything either. Matt has let on that he's working on a reworked website that's not going to be a blogsite anymore. It sounds like a lot of work, so in the meantime we just wait patiently.
If you want to learn the gyst of 180 you can get the ebooks. The ideas are constantly evolving though so the ebooks can get a little behind. Matt updates these from time to time with new info. You can always email Matt your questions too.
Thanks for sharing recipes . i like this recipe ,