 and today we're making delicious collard greens. Amy with collard valley cooks and it's almost New Year's so I'm getting my collards prepared ahead of time. Collard greens are something you can make before the big day and you got to have some on New Year's Day because it's a tradition. Now these are very large collards that I got down at the grocery store. These came from Engels. You want to get two bunches and they had them on sale too for five this week. Whenever you're making a large collard you absolutely do not want to put this large stem in there. That's why I do not like to buy collards that are already chopped and ready to cook because they've all got the big stems in there. The stem is what makes them more bitter tasting and I just don't like to cook it. Now when I wash my collards I always take the big leaf first and I run it under my water. Most of the time they got sand and dirt on them and I rub the large leaf on both sides with my hands like this and that's how I wash it. Before I start tearing all the leaves off I wash them all at one time. That way the water don't have to run forever. I stack them up in my sink and you want to leave one part of the sink open so that when you're rinsing the sand and the dirt off your collards you're not rinsing it on to the clean ones, the ones that you've already wiped off. I also put on a little bit of warm just so it don't freeze my hand the pieces. I just wanted to show y'all that and then I'm almost to the end on washing my collards and then I'm going to start ripping them off the stem and then twisting them and putting them in my pot and I'll show you how to cook it from there. And then after washing it I tear the leaves, the green part off the stem just like that and if they're a really large collar like this one I twist it once and that's how I clean and wash my collards. Once I get all of these rinsed off and in my pot then I'm going to show you how I cook them. Two batches of collards made this pot go all the way to the field and when you put water on collards to know how much water they really need you should take your hands and press them down as tight as you can get them and you're going to start adding water and when that water gets up to your hands in the pot that's all the water you need. So I usually let it go right up to my fingers, right above my fingers like it's doing now and then I turn it off. These are going to reduce a whole lot. It looks like it's going to be a whole lot of collards but once they're cooked it won't be near that many. So you do need to make at least two bunches. I'm going to put two nor bullion cubes in here and yes I use nor bullion in my collards unless I've got some ham handy. I don't like other meats in my collards. I haven't tried the smoked turkey legs I'm sure it's probably pretty good. I just do not like bacon or anything like that in mine. So I use two chicken nor bullions and believe it or not they're delicious when they're done. So if you'll just do it and trust me you'll be surprised. Now we're going to put in about a quarter cup of oil and that's olive oil. You can use whatever kind of oil you want. You can use butter if you want to. Just put some kind of oil in it. And then you want two tablespoons of sugar in there and you can use brown sugar or you can use regular sugar. Just put in two tablespoons. Whichever one you use. Of course if it's regular sugar if it's brown sugar it needs to be packed or heaping on a spoon like this. Or just packed in a regular measuring spoon. So that's two nor bullion. Two tablespoons of sugar. I don't tell you to use brown sugar in my cookbook but you can. Or it doesn't really matter. Whichever one you got. And then put your water in there and we're going to cover these and start to boil them and let them start cooking. It's going to take a while to make these collards and get them tender. So this is not something you need to do an hour before it's time to eat. Make them a day ahead and that way you can reduce them some more if you need to. When you get finished with these you're going to want the collard. Some people call it pot liquor. The actual broth that it makes will be nice and brown and absolutely delicious. All right these have been in here about an hour. Which is pretty close to medium I guess for most of people because I have a lot of gas coming to this eye. Look at what? Why won't you just say this is a big eye? I have a lot of gas. You're, it's in that potato chip bag. And um but look how good the juice looks in it. But now I'm going to cook these a little longer because these are older collards and I am going to cover them with some more water and continue to simmer them. All right we're going to pick these up and get them in the bowl. Now we've been cooking these since 4 30 and it's seven o'clock but we're not really eating them with supper tonight. We're just getting them ready for another day. That was a lot of collards. I could have probably used just a little bit tad more oil in them. But you can see in this bowl how they look and I'm going to give them a taste and see if they've got enough salt. When you cook you need to make sure you taste up before you serve it to somebody else. It's good but it really needs some more salt but before I serve these I'm going to cook most of the juice out of it and so when they reduce they're going to get saltier. So if you reduce yours as much as I do don't add the salt until they reduced all the way down. Then add the salt. If you're going to serve them like this with a lot of water in them then go ahead and add salt. But tonight I'm actually going to pour these out, get them cooled down, get them in the refrigerator and then before I serve them I'll probably cook them down just a little bit more so I'm not going to add salt at this point. Okay I got these cooked up early for new years. We have a tradition. We have collard greens. That is the money, the paper money that we make for the year and we have black eyed peas which is the change. So when we were growing up daddy always made sure that we ate plenty of collard greens and black eyed peas at the table because he said you needed to make more money. I hope you've enjoyed watching Cutter Valley Cooks where we cook like mama did.