Eight More Great Greens

Listed below are what I regard as the most magical of greens. they spark your menus, keep your blood sugar level under control, protect you from diabetes, and nourish your immune system. Besides, they taste good raw or lightly sauteed. I’ll list them alphabetically. Kudos to those of you who clip my columns and file or scrapbook them.

Arugula: Full of vitamins A, B complex, C and K, plus more nitrates than any other veggie. This, like all the colorful produce, yields chlorophyll for healing, and enzymes for good digestion. Arugula is one of the leafy greens we’re advised to eat more of to fight off diabetes, cancer, heart disease, inflammatory diseases and other unpleasant conditions.

Bok Choy is a top-notch source of potassium to help build muscles and keep your blood pressure down. Its Vitamin A, like that in Arugula, aids your immune system. It gives you more than 70 antioxidants. Besides, it’s good raw in salads and briefly cooked in stir-fries.

Cilantro adds an essential flavor to our favorite Thai dishes such as Pad That and Thai Beef Salad, both recipes that have appeared in past Island Epicure columns. Nutritionally, cilantro’s best virtue is its ability to disarm toxic substances.

Collard greens’ assortment of antioxidants lowers stress at the cellular level, helping you ward of cancer. The fiber in collards helps your digestion. They also give you generously of chlorophyll, vitamins A, C, and E, magnesium and manganese. We like it briefly sautéed with garlic in olive oil, then simmered until tender with a little water in a covered skillet.

Dandelion leaves and petals can be harvested for a mixed green salad. Pick the young, tender leaves, or strip out the bitter midrib in larger, older leaves. In Chinese medicine the dandelion is regarded as a tonic, blood cleanser, and digestive aid. Pull petals from the blossoms and strew them across a green salad for decoration as well as nutrition.
Kale can be cooked the same as collards. Lately you see recipes for salads using kale. Unless finely shredded, it seems to me too tough a vegetable for salad. It’s known as a “super food” because it lowers cholesterol and detoxifies our bodies. It gives us lutein and zeaxanthin with help keep our vision sharp.

Swiss Chard tastes great whether you tear up the leaves and put them in a vegetable salad or slice leaves and stems and serve them as a cooked vegetable to sprinkle with a little rice vinegar. Salt optional. It yields Vitamins A, C, and E and the minerals manganese and zinc. These help ward off or cope with colds and detoxify. Its calcium, magnesium and Vitamin K give fabulous bone support.

Watercress cleanses our blood and blocks the action of carcinogens. Use it in a mixed vegetable salad. One cupful would give you a day’s supply of Vitamin K, which regulates blood clotting and helps keep your arteries clear. (If taking warfarin, consult your doctor before loading up on watercress. You don’t want your blood to get too thin, and to have trouble stopping the bleeding from wounds or cuts.) Probably its intense flavor will keep you from eating too much watercress, though, even if you have it growing in a creek in your back yard.

Also, all those greens mentioned for high folate in my column of January 22, have similar nutritive qualities to those listed above. Keep these on your menus: Romaine, Spinach; Turnip greens, Mustard greens, Nappa cabbage, and Chicory.

All these leafy vegetables also are juicy and tasty. They promote saliva that removes bad germs from your mouth. They add to the  amount of  liquid you take in with your morning coffee or tea, soups, and beverages, contribute to sufficient water intake to prevent dehydration, to keep your blood liquid enough to do it’s job of carrying nutrients to every cell, and even to prevent dementia and Alzheimers. Steam, sautée, microwave or eat them raw to preserve their vitamins and minerals. Boiling tends to destroy their nutrients.