jen's everyday blog

Cooking Lettuce

I’ve got a bunch of links I want to post before they disappear from my history list, but I’ve been very busy working the last few days. However, I had to take some time out to post about my lettuce experience this morning because I’m very excited about it.

I’ve been trying hard to reduce our food wastage in the last few months. This is especially important now, since I’ve just built an experimental indoor composter and it has fairly limited capacity. So I decided I would have to find something to do with a head of romain lettuce and a bag of baby lettuce greens that we hadn’t eaten yet. My first idea was to make the lettuce into soup, which is apparently quite possible. Here, for example, is a recipe for “Lettuce soup- for lettuce haters”. So this morning I fried up a nice onion from our local farms market (yay!) and chucked in the lettuce. Quite frankly, I was expecting to be disgusted by the mushy mess I expected the lettuce turned into. I figured I would avoid looking at it, puree it quickly, and move on. Instead what happened was that delicious smells started to waft from the wok- smells like Bok Choi and Stir Fried Chinese Greens. The lettuce also looked surprisingly tasty in its cooked state. So I tasted some and it tasted like… bok choi and stir fried chinese greens. It was delicious! So instead of making it into soup, I ate it for breakfast. Apparently, according to this article “Although cooking lettuce is an idea unfamiliar to most Westerners, the Chinese have been doing it for centuries. Michael Chu, who gave us this recipe for grilled scallops with braised romaine, had never eaten raw lettuce until he came to this country from Hong Kong.” So there you go. Just think of it as stir fried chinese greens.

posted at 12:32 on Wed, 19 Jul, 2006 | path: /living



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