Snout to Tail Vegan Style

If it's Saturday, it's Farmer's Market Day for us.  We don't make it there every Saturday, but I sure wish we did.  This Saturday we made the trip to the market.  I usually have a grocery list, but once I get down there, all bets are off.  Whatever looks good to me, comes home with us.

We got back home in plenty of time to cook lunch.  As I was putting the produce away, I got to thinking about
the waste from some of the veggies.  We had bought a huge bunch of radishes, with a lot of good looking leaves.  I had never cooked radish leaves before, but I had tasted them before and always thought they had a really good taste.  I cut the leaves off the radishes, washed them, and set them aside.

I had bought a large bunch of green
onions, (scallions), with green tops which were over a foot long.  I cut off a large portion of the green tops to make them fit into the fridge.  I washed those long pieces of green tops and put them aside.

I decided at this point that I would make beans and greens.  I took some garbanzo beans out of the freezer and thawed them in the microwave.   I cooked a pot of rice blend, which
included brown Japonica rice, long grain red rice, and heirloom black rice, (something I found at Costco this last week).  It was delicious, by the way,  and I would definitely purchase this again.

Then I cut up some rainbow chard and dinosaur kale which I had bought at the Farmer's Market.  Okay, the lunch started coming together.  I have to come clean here, as actually at this point I turned all of this over to my son to saute and bring together as he saw fit.

He sauteed the kale, radish greens, chard, and some baby spinach together in
vegetable broth.  Then he added the chopped green onions and sauteed a few more minutes.  He added salt, pepper, some Tabasco sauce, and Northwoods Seasoning blend, (from Penzey's).   At this point we added the garbanzo beans and heated them through.

We served the beans and greens over the rice blend, with chow chow added to the top.  Some good old cornbread rounded out the meal.

It is really fun to cook like this, with no recipe.  I know some people cook like this a lot, with great results.  My daughter does this style of cooking most of the time, and that girl can really cook!

Our inspiration for this meal, as my son stated, was to take the "snout to tail" approach to cooking, as referred to using a whole hog, with no waste.  In our plant based way of cooking, we were taking things which were sometimes thrown away, (radish greens, the tops of green onions), and using them in our dish.  It was the best "beans and greens" dish I have ever tasted.  Our son called it "roots to tops" cooking.