How To Cook Your Greens Just Right

After a few minutes of steaming, when the collards are still too “raw” and uncooked to chew, I will remove them from the steamer and put them in a bowl.  I remove them from the heat early like this because when the collards are sitting in the bowl starting to cool down, they are still cooking.

When I get it just right, by the time they are cool enough to eat, they have the perfect texture, ie, they are easy to chew but are still firm.  Not soft and mushy.

One way to gauge when you have cooked collards and other green, leafy vegetables just a bit too much is to watch the color of the vegetable.  When you get it just right, the plant will be soft enough to chew but the color will still be that original deep, rich green color that the plant had when it was fully raw and uncooked. 

When you have cooked the plant just a bit too much, the color will change quite drastically.  It will be a duller, more olive green. 

You can see this in action when you eat out at a restaurant and something like broccoli is served with your meal.  If the chef knows what they are doing, your broccoli will arrive with its rich, green color still intact.  If it has been overcooked, you can tell immediately just by looking at it.  That rich green color will be gone, replaced with a dull, more olive brown color. 

And finally, let’s move to the kind of leafy green vegetable that’s super alkaline, has lots of vitamins and minerals in it, is really good for you but is also extremely hard, fibrous and difficult to break down.  A classic example of this is green kale.

Kale is very alkaline and has lots of chlorophyll in it.  Very healthy.  But you practically have to pound it with a hammer to get it into edible form.  So here’s what I do often with kale. 

First, I will steam it, making sure not to overcook it.  In fact, when I pull it out of the steamer for phase two of the preparation process, it’s still pretty hard. But what I do next is put the kale in a blender, add some of the hot water from the bottom of the steamer, put the blender on high and then grind that tough plant to a creamy pulp. 

So what I’ve done here is two things we talked about in the last newsletter issue.  First, I’ve used heat to break down the glucose polymers. 

And second, I’ve used the mechanical action of the blender (the “hammer” if you will) to literally break down the cellular walls to release the glucose further. 

It’s sort of like the first phase of what a juicer does; it breaks up the cell walls to release the juice from the plant. 

Once I’ve got the kale and water to a soup like consistency, I then add seasoning and half an avocado to the blender.  This makes the mixture nice and thick.  I then pour it into a bowl and eat it as soup.  

So when you are going to prepare green, leafy vegetables of any kind, consider first how tough they are to eat in raw form and then simply apply heat or mechanical action in various combinations to get the plant into a form where the nutrition in it can be easily assimilated by your body.

And if you feel like you have very poor digestion, do what the Gerson Therapy cancer protocol does; juice some of your vegetables raw (add half a Granny Smith or other green apple for flavor) and then thoroughly cook some of your other vegetables on very low heat so they are easy for your body to use.  And replace the delicate nutrients that have been cooked out of your food with high quality, PLANT BASED multi vitamin nutritional supplements.

Remember, digestion takes a fair amount of energy from the body.  If you are in poor health and your digestion is shot, you want to make it as easy as possible to get nutrition into your body so that your body can put more of its energy towards healing, not digesting your food.

It’s like when you are very sick with the “flu”; you don’t go to the gym and work out really hard do you?  No, you stay at home, rest and sleep and allow your body to put as much of your energy reserves as possible into mounting an adequate immune response in order for you to get better.

- Andy

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