Cooking Mustard Greens, Drinking Indio

I finally got a chance to cook some mustard greens out of the garden. Not that anyone really cares, but I thought I would share how I cooked them. First crack open a beer, in my case an Indio that my mother-in law brought back from her last trip to Mexico. One perk about marrying into a Mexican family, you get Mexican things that don't always get exported to the States.


The bounty! I thought this was going to be way to much for just my spouse and I, but it shrank down a lot after cooking. I harvested by just cutting the outer leaves and leaving the middle ones to keep growing, the "cut and come again" method. You can see the mustard green plants on previous pictures of my front yard garden. They are the ones on the back corners towards my Texas natives garden.


Sliced it all up like lettuce and dried it in my salad spinner. I made sure to clean this batch thoroughly, since I gave my little sister a whole bunch of Swiss chard, and she found a caterpillar in her food after she had eaten most of it. That's funny!


I sauteed some garlic and shallots (recipe called for onions, but neither of us like onions) in olive oil, then through in the mustard greens. Stirred it around a bit, and then covered.


Since there is so much before it cooks down, I had to run two skillets. One is for cooking the greens, the second is for holding the already cooked greens and keeping them warm.


Put them all back together and added some Pinot Grigio white wine vinegar, and let simmer for just a few minutes.


Done. Add it as a side to our roasted acorn squash and peanuts. So, this meal was almost all local. Mustard greens from my garden. Garlic, shallots, and acorn squash from our CSA farm in east Austin. So only the peanuts and the olive oil was not local. Now the best part is the peanuts were probably grown in Vietnam, sent to China for packaging, sent to California, then to the brands headquarters in Alabama for distribution, then probably sent to the HEB distribution center then finally to my HEB. So, they defeat any notion of feeling good about eating local, since they made up all the miles.

Fall Bounty and some Texas Ecology

A bit of food from the backyard! Salad greens and radishes made a nice winter style salad for a night that dropped into the 30's.


First time to grow radishes, but they seemed to come out OK. Some had already split from being in the ground too long, but still tasty. When they say radishes are a fast growing annual, they mean fast growing.

The front yard garden is still doing well with Swiss chard, two cabbage plants, some mustard greens, and collard greens. More pictures to come when I actually get a chance to harvest and cook a meal with all this. Life has been busy.



I had a Gulf Muhly (Muhlenbergia capillaris) in my native garden that wasn't doing very well, so I decided I needed to have a prescribed burn. I burned the clump down to a nub, which turned out to be a trip since I did not think about the dry cedar mulch that was around it. All in all, I didn't burn down the neighborhood, and the muhly clump started growing back already and its only been about a week and a half. There's some Texas ecology for you. Texas loves to burn!