With this one recipe, you can tick off all your New Year’s resolutions at once. (Unless your resolution was to eat more donuts — then I can’t help you.).
But if you wanted to cook more in season (and not turn orange from all that squash), to DIY more, to eat more leafy greens, to give veganism a go, to add fire and force to your everyday cooking? This is all you need.
You just have to treat mustard greens like they’ve never been treated before.
You might be prone to grabbing for their soft frills for salad, whenever you get annoyed by kale’s toothy edges. Or wilting them into angry little piles. You appreciate their spunk, but eating a whole bowl can leave you with a cloud of wasabi crawling up the back of your throat.
No wonder a reader poll over at The Kitchn revealed them as one of the vegetables we fear cooking most.
But maybe we’ve misunderstood them this whole time. We were thinking “greens,” when we should have been thinking “mustard.”
Instead of setting them loose in a salad bowl and willing everything else to keep up, try capturing and channeling their heat, and bottling it — as mustard green harissa.
This is a relatively new, largely inauthentic idea. That's because vegetable-forward thinker Bryant Terry invented it for his 2014 book "Afro-Vegan." How?
“I approached the creation of recipes for ‘Afro-Vegan’ as a collagist — cutting, pasting, and remixing the ingredients, flavor profiles, and classic dishes of the African continent, Caribbean, and American South,” Terry wrote to me.
“Harissa is one of my favorite condiments, and I thought it would be interesting to create a hot pepper paste inspired by it using the Southern staple mustard greens as a foundation.” Even though it never existed before now, everything about this makes sense.
This will seem like a lot of ingredients to gather, and a lot of different small tasks to accomplish. It will all pay off in the final pot of harissa, smoky and stinging and bright.
In a world of 5-ingredient Genius Recipes, this is unheard of. (But, listen, a 15-ingredient hot sauce has a lot more possibility.)
Use it anywhere your food could use a little smacking around — in a dressing for roasted vegetables; spooned into the pot with your grains; in your eggs, your soups, your marinades.
And yes, just like its namesakes, mustardy harissa does a world of good on a sandwich. (Another resolution: Make more sandwiches.)
Bryant Terry’s Mustard Green Harissa
Adapted slightly from Afro-Vegan (Ten Speed Press, 2014)
Yields about 1 cup
1 1/4 tsp. coarse sea salt
1 cup packed chopped mustard greens
3 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 tsp. coriander seeds
1/2 tsp. cumin seeds
6 Tbsp. chopped jalapeño chiles (seeds and ribs removed only if you want it less spicy)
1 tsp. smoked paprika
1 tsp. red pepper flakes
1/4 tsp. cayenne pepper
1 Tbsp. minced cilantro
1 Tbsp. minced flat-leaf parsley
1 Tbsp. freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 Tbsp. red wine vinegar
2 tsp. water
Put about 4 cups of water in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil over high heat. Add 1 teaspoon of the salt, then add the mustard greens. Return to a boil and cook uncovered until the greens are wilted, about 2 minutes. Drain well.
Warm the oil in a small skillet over low heat. Add the garlic and cook, stirring occasionally, until the garlic starts to turn golden, about 5 minutes. Transfer to a small heatproof bowl and set aside to cool.
In the same skillet, toast the coriander and cumin, shaking the pan occasionally, until fragrant. Let cool for a few minutes, then transfer to a mortar or spice grinder and grind into a fine powder.
Transfer the powder to a blender (we found a mini-food processor works best). Add the jalapeños, paprika, red pepper flakes, cayenne, cilantro, parsley, lemon juice, vinegar, water, mustard greens, garlic oil, and the remaining 1/4 teaspoon salt. Puree until smooth.
Taste and season with more salt if desired. Use immediately or store in a tightly sealed jar in the refrigerator for up to 1 week.
This article originally appeared on Food52.com: http://food52.com/blog/9538-bryant-terry-s-mustard-green-harissa
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