 The following is a production of New Mexico State University. Welcome to the VEGA show, Vegetables in Great Abundance. My name is Keri Bachman and I work at New Mexico State University as a nutrition educator. This series is featuring farmers markets in New Mexico and all the wonderful vegetables that we can buy there. Now today we're actually going to be looking at some of the items that are available in your winter market. And you might be watching this show and it might not exactly be winter anymore, but don't worry you can use different ingredients and make a very similar dish. And I'll explain how you can do that as we go along. If you've never been to a farmer's market I really encourage you to go take the kids as well. It's just such a lot of fun to actually go and meet the growers of the food that we sometimes take for granted. We often shop at the grocery store and we don't really notice that food comes from a piece of ground and a specific person who's grown it. And that connection is something that we can rebuild when we visit the farmer's market. Also the food that we get there hasn't traveled for miles and miles so it's going to be a lot fresher. And sometimes it's even going to be healthier because it's maintained its nutrient levels better. Now one of the things with vegetables, a lot of times children don't like to eat them. And this show is going to give you lots of tips and ideas on how to actually encourage your kids to enjoy vegetables and to like to enjoy preparing them as well. Vegetables are something that's for the entire family, young and old alike. Now we're going to focus as I said today on some winter vegetables. And what we'll do is we'll go to one of the farmer's markets here in the Albuquerque area and we're going to visit with some of the growers at that market and then come back to the studio here and prepare those foods into a healthy sautéed kale recipe. Now in New Mexico we've got a lot of farmer's markets so if you don't live here in Albuquerque don't worry you can find a farmer's market in your local area and we'll show a number at the end of the show if you'd like to figure out how to contact those people. I hope you enjoy the show today. Let's get started and visit the market. Carrie welcome to the market. Well thank you Sue. The Los Ranchos market started just about 14 years ago and has grown steadily and we are very fortunate to have a wonderful group of local growers who come from actually as far south as Little Salinas and Cedarcrest and Placitas to sell here. So we have a good wonderful group of people. Our season starts May 7th, runs every week through the end of October and we're here from 7 to 11 in the morning. Okay and it's always on Saturday. It's always on Saturday. We try to have lots of special events to appeal to all ages of people and we have face painting for kids and free recipe sheets so that you can go pack orange sheets with recipes on it for kids to help with snacks and we have a variety of different types of food so you can do your whole menu shopping here. I'm visiting here with Dan who is a friend of mine and also a farmer. He also happens to just be the director of president. I'm trying to remember the name. We're a director of president. President. Of the New Mexico Food and Act Policy Council which is a great group that combines a lot of people, nutrition people like myself, farmers like Dan, folks in industry, people in education and really looking at food and agriculture in the big systems picture. And as I said Dan is a grower here and I've had my eye on your kale for a while this morning. I'm glad you still have some left. I have some left. Well tell me Dan you said that this over winter. So how is the flavor going to be as a result of being in the cold weather? Well the great thing about either root crops or greens that make it through the winter through the season are really sweet this time. I mean typically what makes some of these more bitter or more acid oxalic acid like a spinach is the heat. So we haven't had any heat to speak of. So we've had warm weather now and they're really starting to produce again and they're very sweet. They don't have that oxalic acid. They don't have that tartness if you will. Bitterness that they will get if the season progresses. And that's something that's sort of an acquired taste. I think people who didn't grow up like as I did in the south where we ate kale and other kinds of greens. They're not used to that. So it's a perfect time of year to try this new crop, try a new food and it's sweet and they'll develop a taste for it. We were just talking about this new educational thing with kids in schools. We'd go cook and I'd always take chard and kale because the kids, it's an immediate reaction of oh what is that? And then it's like oh they either know it and they go oh I don't eat that. So we cook it, we cut it up, we saute it together and then they eat it and they go oh wow and then the parents come in and the kid goes we just ate some chard in the mom's mouth drop and the dads are going you ate chard? They look at me and go how did you get them to do that? Well it's really an issue of simplicity of preparation which is you know either throw it in a steamer I actually prefer sauteing it in olive oil even with onion, garlic because you can cook it as much as you want but the flavors will come out so much more when you saute it and it's so simple you know even people on the middle time in the kitchen can cook greens and I tell people once you've got it in the pan if you shut the heat off and put a lid on it then you can adjust how long it cooks and eat it if some people like it crisp like this and other people like that will get down and cook it once you've got the lid on you can stop it at any point that's you know how to eat greens of any kind you know you can't even buy salad collards here so few people understand the colors really and that's a shame collards are something that actually are less bitter tasting than kale and so they're a little bit easier to get a taste for I kind of like the two mixed together actually makes a real nice combination it's kind of like with the carrots anything in the ground too this time of year the sweetness there's none of that shipped in from far away taste because they're fresh they did just come out of the ground yesterday they're rich they're full bodied I just can't say enough good things about greens and early spring vegetables it's so amazing well you know it's funny I think a lot of people this time of year think well what vegetables are there even to eat and actually it's one of my favorite times of year I'm a little sad when the summer comes because we don't get to enjoy these winter greens that was really fun getting a chance to visit with my friend Dan and his wife Vicki and getting a chance also to look at the kale that they grow now I actually went there to their house last night and picked up some kale so it would be nice and fresh for the show today let me show you what it looks like coming out of the ground this is some kale that was planted a year ago and you can see it really looks almost like a tree you can tell that on the bottom this is where Dan and Vicki have been harvesting the leaves and then as they harvest it continues to grow up on the top you can see that it's almost about time to harvest this plant entirely because this is what's called bolting the plant has actually started forming these flowers here and if you look at them closely they look a lot like broccoli well that gives you a clue kale is in the same family as broccoli and cauliflower and it's also like broccoli and cauliflower very very healthy so it's something that we really want to encourage our children to learn to like at a young age and there's no better time to do it than when it's winter and these crops actually taste really sweet so we've got two kinds of kale here today this one that I'm holding that looks like the tree this is called dwarf blue it doesn't look very small right now but that again is because it's a year old believe it or not because a little bit different color and a little more frilly leaves is called Russian red and they have actually different flavors so you'll get a chance when you're cooking with these foods remember the greens even though we call these cooking greens you can also eat them fresh especially when they're real small and tender they can go straight into salads mmm that is amazingly sweet that could go into a salad even right there now how you might wonder if you're going to wash this crazy vegetable well what you can do is really start with something that's a little bit smaller and more easy to handle and I've already washed this one but I'll demonstrate to you exactly how it works you'd want to use a little bit more water than this but actually immerse it all the way in the water and kind of swish up and down like this once you've gotten it clean it's really very easy to prepare you can just take a knife and kind of chop off the stems or chop off the leaves where they meet the main stem the idea here is you want to keep as much of this main stem as you can because that's a really nice part of the plant to use some people don't use that part they only use the leaves but I really actually like to use the stems as well and then I'll demonstrate here chopping kale is really pretty simple of course you want to chop correctly make sure that you're not chopping fingers into your kale but you can see just bite sized pieces is fine some people even like to leave it a little bit larger kale is a vegetable that's been eaten for many many years the Romans and people in medieval times really enjoyed it and I think you'll find that your family enjoys it too let's go ahead and put this in with the rest of the kale I've already chopped well we're here at the Los Ranchos growers market and I'm speaking with Mary who's got as you can see a real assortment of wonderful things we've got flowers here and the plants that you can just buy I think they were what a dollar each that's an incredible bargain some dried catnip and rosemary looks like some arugula and over here some pecans those are walnuts we have a very big walnut tree that's incredible and you don't see walnuts that often in New Mexico you kind of would think of pecans or pistachios that's quite a few in the valley do you have a lot of walnuts or an English walnut they outside are not that hard to crack wow you know we may need to actually get some of these for our salad or maybe for even our kale dish that we're going to make here I was so excited to actually see walnuts at one of our farmers markets in New Mexico you know I come from the southern part of the state and pecans is really the more common nut that we see there but to actually have home grown walnuts that we can use in our dish today it's really a lot of fun some of you may know how to use this it's a nutcracker and this is another way to get your kids involved in the food preparation these are a little bit hard to crack and it takes a little bit of practice but you can see that once you crack it open the shell sometimes goes flying it's a nice activity to do outside for that reason let me crack it open just a little bit more here okay and you can see once you open a nut pecans are similar you're going to have this inner shell and then inside you've got this nice what they call the nut meat or the edible part of the nut so that's the part that you're going to want to keep you can't really eat this other part of it here it's just too chewy and too hard for humans to digest but the way you can do is once you've got it cracked use the nut pick and just gently let the nut pieces out it's a real art to doing this I don't have it down by any means but you can see why having whole nuts in a pie is really something that used to be very prized as a skill now a lot of you may be saying well why are we eating nuts nuts aren't really that healthy for us actually nuts are quite healthy they're high in calories as you probably know but they're high in healthy fat for us the other thing that they also have is a lot of protein and so what you can see here I'm not going to get the rest of this nut out but you can see how long it takes to actually get a nut out of the shell and if we ate nuts like this in this form all the time we wouldn't be overeating them and that's why it's always nice to have a bowl of local nuts on your table and the coffee room table the kids can actually when they're hungry take the nutcracker without overdoing it now you may wonder what is this going to have to do with the kale that we're working with well it's one of the ways that we can make kale into a dish that children will like they actually really like nuts a lot and so it's a way to add something tasty to a dish that might not be so familiar and if at first they don't like it we'll keep trying don't take it personally it takes a while to like new foods let's go visit Mary now for the third ingredient in our dish if you're familiar with ginger it looks a little bit like that but it's not can you tell us Mary what this is well this is Jerusalem artichoke it grows in the ground in the winter in the spring and you can pull it up and eat it that way in the summertime it sprouts and grows about a thing tall and it has beautiful yellow little sunflowers on the end of it they're actually related to it they are and I got these from a woman who's going to feed six children and her husband would go down to the river and get frog legs and they would eat Jerusalem artichokes no kidding she had a lot of kids and not that much money and that's where I first got started well you know it's interesting that a lot of foods we think of as maybe survival foods have kind of come back in this day and age to be sort of a gourmet food how would you go about preparing this for people who don't know they might wonder well I like to just take it and you don't even have to do any more than just wash it and it's very much like jicama but it's not as sweet and you can just cut this up in small pieces and put it in your salad or whatever you like to eat it with and it's kind of like a crunchiness to the same and it's well known especially back east because I have a cookbook from the victory garden that a lot of people like to watch on PBS and it's there's a whole chapter that's devoted to Jerusalem artichokes and some people cook them just like potatoes some people shred them and make pancakes with them I've cut them up in small pieces and put them in vegetable dishes there's just wow and these are just so wonderful I mean the skin on this is just very tender you can even eat the skin I'm imagining great just need to wash them a little bit carefully well these are wonderful you know this is going to taste really good I think in our kale dish it'll provide a little bit of crunch and also a little bit of sweetness so this is wonderful kind of like water chestnuts right but something that's actually you could grow in your own yard the one thing I do know is that these tend to spread and so once you get them you're not going to have them for a while I have them in an area where it doesn't matter in fact I have blackberries and I sell the blackberries at the growers market that's my main crop and these things kind of grow and above the blackberries so when the blackberries are done here comes the artichokes and they don't seem to mine that's great that's really wonderful well thank you so much Mary well these are the same Jerusalem artichokes that I bought from Mary last weekend and you can see they've kept really nicely just in a plastic bag in my refrigerator they've already been rinsed off a little bit but we want to make sure to get all of that grit and dirt off because these grow under the ground just like potatoes do so you want to just kind of put them in water like this you can use the same water you used for the kale and get them washed off nicely now as we were mentioning the skin is really nice and thin with these you don't have to peel them peeling them is not a lot of fun you can see they look a lot like potatoes on the inside you can cook them just as you would potatoes but they'll cook faster so make sure they don't cook them too long or they'll get mushy now I'm just going to cut them into slices here texture wise when they're raw they are like hickama or water chestnuts very nice crunchy delicate flavor when they're cooked you can actually get them to be a little bit softer and you can even mash them but they're just so beautiful once we've cut them we're going to put them into here which is water to which I've added just a little bit of vinegar that keeps them from turning brown and then we'll put them back here on the side now Jerusalem artichokes are a really interesting vegetable they actually originated in North America so they're native to this continent now the Native Americans grew them and they introduced them to people from Europe who came over and took them back for a while they were pretty popular and then they started that was before they really enjoyed potatoes once potatoes became popular in Europe Jerusalem artichokes lost a bit of favor and in fact people said that they thought they would give them leprosy because of these funny bulbs that they have on them in fact they're very healthy they've got a lot of iron and they're a really nice vegetable that you can grow in your own garden you can plant just a little bit like this about three or four inches down it's a beautiful plant that looks like a sunflower it has a gorgeous flower on the top and then when you're hungry when you're looking for Jerusalem artichokes you just go into the yard and you can pick them now the interesting thing about these is they're actually used during war time in Europe they were one of the few foods that you could access without needing a ration card so they really served a very important purpose and here too in New Mexico we can grow these very easily something the kids would really like to grow harvest and then you can even eat them raw they are so tasty you could serve them with a dip so many things we can do with them but today we're going to put them into our kale saute so let's go ahead and we'll get started cooking our dish up here alright we've got everything here that we need for our sauteed kale we've got our kale, two different kinds that we cut up earlier we've got Jerusalem artichokes that we're going to go and then of course don't forget the walnuts which are going to add a nice little bit of flavor and protein at the very end now what we're going to do I've got this electric skillet here you can do this in a frying pan or a pot at home you want to make sure you do it in something that has a nice tight fitting lid I'm going to add just a bit of olive oil again olive oil is healthy for us and so it's a nice oil to use and you can also add garlic or saute some onions with this recipe, I'm just going to keep it simple today all we're going to be using is the kale and the Jerusalem artichokes in here together now as I mentioned these are going to taste different and cook up differently depending on how long you cook them I'm going to go ahead and put them in right now and they'll be a bit softer turn this up a little bit there we go you can smell that already put in our Jerusalem artichokes and stir them around a little bit any bit of water that they have on them is fine they don't have to be entirely dry you see what they'll do they'll start looking a bit like potatoes as they cook just want to kind of get them coated with oil here and then what we're going to do is going to put in a whole bunch of greens right on top of those this may seem like a lot but what happens with these is they'll cook down and when they heat up they're going to get reduced in size so we can pretty much fill up the whole pan and now we're just going to put the lid as I said make sure it's tightly fitting so that it steams nicely I'm going to turn the heat down a little bit I mentioned earlier that you might not always find kale at your farmer's market and there's some other things that you can use other than kale here's an idea, these are called chard it's a delicious plant that's related to spinach and that's something that would take a little less time to cook there are other kinds of plants in the same family though as kale and we normally are used to eating the root but here actually you can use the beet greens as well and they're very tasty cooked up turnip greens are also delicious collard greens all of these things and you'll find if you start getting your kids used to them they will develop a taste for them and so will you let's go ahead and see how this is doing here you can see on the bottom that it's starting to wilt a little bit oh that smells so good and you can really, of course if your hands are clean you can really just toss it like this with your hands it's not going to get too awfully hot especially here at the beginning just want to toss it a little bit and then we'll let that cook when we come back we'll see how it ends up we'll put the walnuts on at the very end now remember you can add other tastes to this as well, garlic and onion it's delicious no matter what you do well I'm here at the Los Ranchos growers market and I have found an old friend, Jerry Aragon who actually works with me in the Cooperative Extension Service Jerry is one of our ICANN nutrition educators and you also have your own business in your free time tell me what you've got here today and how did this get started and tell me a little bit well here with the market I've been here this will be my 13th year summer when we start back in May and I just started off they asked me to come out and do a smoothie juice bar back then I didn't really know a whole lot about that but I brought some strawberries and bananas and people would pass and I'd blend up and I'd sell maybe one here and there and so I got this bright idea of breakfast burritos I was raised in my grandmother they had cafes all over New Mexico and so I've been familiar with food and then the ICANN with the food safety I brought six burritos, blink my eyes they were gone and here I am 13 years later and I can't have enough baked goods the sole and the different flavors I have a lot of loyal customers that really look forward to coming here to have a healthy breakfast well you know it's nice too because a lot of times we'll find sweets but nothing else and Jerry has a real variety here and one thing that we like to say in our ICANN classes a sweet roll every once in a while is funny you don't need to cut those out of your diet entirely but tell us a little bit about what you've got here because this is what I've got my eye on I've got the traditional pozole I've got the diced pork the white corn with some red chili and a little onions and spices it is the real real traditional pozole that we have here in New Mexico it's usually our Christmas soup but here at the market Christmas is every Saturday morning and this time of year when it's cold it's really a treat at 6 in the morning when I'm here I have people come and they pick up their ports to take home and of course they grab their bowl a pozole and their burrito and they eat here I have an extra table and they sit and have an outside cafe that's wonderful well it's neat to see how you can actually educate people who are coming to the market about healthy fresh foods like this one which is also a traditional food that we enjoy in New Mexico a lot of people aren't making this at home anymore but you can come to the market and Jerry's got it right here fresh well I think I will go ahead and have a cup of that that would be wonderful Jerry thank you so much and while you're getting that let me just explain a little bit about what our program does I mentioned that Jerry and I both work with the ICAN program which stands for ideas for cooking and nutrition and this is a nutrition education program where you can actually come together with a group of people you get together learn about healthy foods and the best part is you actually get to prepare them yourselves and try them well so if I for example don't know how to make pozole but I really enjoy it I could come to one of your classes and learn yes wow well that would be wonderful and we know you're a wonderful cook Jerry so that's something that's a real resource in our community here we also we teach a lot of stir fries and a lot of the vegetables and fruits in our classes so I've taught a lot of people in the community more welcome well that's great you know as you see vegetables on our show that you'd like to learn more about certainly this ICAN program is a very good resource so please do give us a call thanks so much wow that just looks spectacular let me go ahead and dish up someone to my plate here you can cook this a little bit longer or a little bit shorter if you'd like it's one of those things kale is very forgiving and it's still going to be full of nutrition even if you cook it a little bit longer than that now let's not forget our local walnuts just sprinkle a few on top you could toast them even for a little bit more flavor let's see how this came out now that is tasty if your kids like a little sweetness you can put some raisins in as well and that's really tasty mmm let's see how that Jerusalem artichoke came out looks like it's still pretty crunchy it's a nice crunch a little bit like water chestnut hmm I hope you'll give this recipe a try at home and even if you can't find exactly the same foods at the farmer's market you're still bound to find delicious things that you're going to want to try with your kids remember it can take up to 8 times trying a new food before you actually learn to like it so don't give up after the first time you might try your kale sauteed like this you could even eat it raw with some salad dressing try it different ways and your family will actually over time develop a taste for it and I think you'll really find that it's a part of your diet that you enjoy green leafy vegetables are so full of nutrients and the farmer's market is a wonderful place to find them now Jerry mentioned that we have nutrition classes and I'd like to remember remind you to give us a call at the number you see on your screen if you'd like to learn more about the nutrition classes the farmer's market is in your area or find out some more about healthy foods in general just give us a call and I hope you'll tune in for the next show of VEGA vegetables in great abundance we'll see you then