Bread Crumb Stir Fried Collard Greens, Water Crackers with Baba Ganouj, Watermelon Radish

Tonight is going to be my last dinner probably till Monday; we're lucky to live in an area with great festivals, such as Full Frame, the country's largest documentary film festival, which is on essentially 10a-midnight this Thursday-Saturday, and 10a-9p or so on Sunday. I am a film reviewer for a magazine, and always look forward to covering this event. My film schedule is pretty packed and some days I barely have a few half hour breaks - I hope that the press room has some reasonable vegan vittles.

As a preamble for tonight's dinner, I made a tasty cantaloupe - strawberry - vanilla coconut milk yogurt smoothie/juice in my Vitamix blender. Yum!

I found a recipe online for stir fried kale, and used it to make a main course, but with collard greens instead of kale. I used my Vitamix to chop an onion; I cut the onion into five or so parts and simply ran the machine at 3 or 4 on the variable speed dial (out of 10), dropping onion parts in one at a time. I did the same with the half leftover from yesterday of the lovely garlic with greens we got this week.

I started sauteeing the onion and garlic over medium-high heat. When it softened and cleared up a bit, maybe after 4 minutes or so, I added a third of a cup or so of bread crumbs, and stirred them till they turned lightly brown.

In the meantime, I used the wet method of chopping in the Vitamix. I cut off the protruding collard greens stems and, where the stem was reasonably thick in the center of a leaf, I hand tore the leaf away from the stem. In thirds, I put the greens into the blender, then added enough water to let the leaves float. I briefly (5 seconds?) ran the blender at around 5 on variable speed, which nicely shredded the leaves coarsely.

When the bread crumbs browned, I added the shredded collard greens and cooked for a few minutes till the greens were slightly wilted. I added some dried oregano and salt, and served. It was quite good! (My wife told me that in her part of India, Maharashtra, besan, or chickpea flour, is used instead of bread crumbs to make greens dishes like this; I should try that sometime!)

I also served some sesame water crackers with baba ganouj that my wife had purchased yesterday. Some watermelon radish slices completed the meal.