Serves 4 to 6, depending on your fondness for beans.

Beans and Greens Salad

2 c. dried navy or Great Northern beans, or 4 c. cooked
1/2 c. dried tomatoes
1/2 lb or so fresh greens (beet greens, spinach, chard, kale, etc.) or 1 c. frozen
1 clove garlic, minced
handful of basil leaves, chopped or chiffonaded
1 T + 1/2 c. olive oil
1/4 red wine vinegar
salt and pepper

1) If using dried beans, cook via your preferred method. I like to soak them, then cook 5 minutes in a pressure cooker at 15 pounds of pressure. Rinse. If using canned beans, be sure to rinse them well to remove excess salt.

2) Rehydrate your tomatoes. Cover the tomatoes with boiling water. Let them steep for about 10 minutes. Drain, saving the delicious tomato water for another purpose.

3) If using fresh greens: Wash in several changes of water until the water is clean. Remove large stems, if necessary. Give the leaves a few big whacks with the knife to make them more manageable. If you’re using chard, save them stems and dice them. If using frozen greens: remove from the freezer bag and chop them up to ensure a more even thaw in the pan. Heat up the 1 T oil in a large pot and add the garlic and chard stems (if using). Cook carefully for about 5 minutes, making sure to not let the garlic burn. Turn down the heat, add the leaves, stir to coat with the oil and garlic, and cover. The remaining water on the leaves should be sufficient to steam them, but add more if necessary. Just cook until wilted or tender, depending on the heartiness of the green. Frozen greens won’t need much time at all—the goal is basically to warm them up.

4) Make your vinaigrette. Whisk the remaining oil into the vinegar. Add salt and pepper to taste.

5) Toss everything together. If time allows, let the flavors marry for at least 20 minutes before adjusting the seasonings.

You’ve got three basic options: freezing, dehydrating, or canning. More ambitious folks can try fermenting, like I did with my bumper crop of bok choi last year. But let’s stick with the basics here.

Freezing Greens

This is the easiest, and probably the best, solution. It’s very, very easy to freeze greens. You just blanch them, cool them in an ice bath, and freeze. I’ve got step-by-step instructions and photos here. Assuming you’ve got a good freezer, these will keep very well for a year. We used ours all winter in soups, stews, pastas, dips, and even just sauteed with garlic. They shrink dramatically when blanched—plan on about a pound of fresh greens to make about two cups.

For most people, this is the way to go. If, however, you have limited freezer space, you live in an area that experiences frequent power outages, or are planning for a future without electricity, you need other options. Alas, they’re not great. But, you asked, so here goes.

Dehydrating Greens

Are you one of those people who likes to sprinkle seaweed flakes over your rice bowl at the local health food store? Then you might like this. Steam your greens just until they’re wilted. Transfer them to dehydrator trays and dry at a low temperature (say, 110ºF) just until they’re crispy. You’ll want to keep an eye on them—within two hours, mine looked like this:

Now what, you may ask, would you do with dehydrated turnip greens? That’s an excellent question. I rehydrated some with a little bit of room temperature water, and they looked pretty good. The problem was that they had no perceptible taste. In the end, I crumbled them up and stuck them in a spice jar:

I sprinkled an entire leaf’s worth of flakes over a bowl of roasted potatoes and couldn’t tell they were there. I suspect that they’re still fairly nutritious, though, so maybe this isn’t such a bad way to incorporate hearty greens into your diet. I guess.

Canning Greens

The things I do for science.

Yes, it is possible to can hearty greens. It requires a pressure cooker and a processing time of 1 hour, 10 minutes for pints and 1 hour, 30 minutes for quarts. Yes, you read that right. And after you’ve subjected these poor, innocent vegetables to 240ºF to more than an hour, you get this appetizing product:

(And that’s the glamor shot.)

The nutritional value of all of this is questionable. They taste about like you would expect them to. If, however, you have absolutely no other options and feel strongly about having a pantry full of shelf-stable vegetables, this technique will serve you well. But Lordy, do they smell bad. Here’s how you do it.

1) Bring about 3 quarts of water to a boil. You need 2 quarts for the pressure canner, plus some extra to pour over the greens.
2) Steam the greens until wilted. Cut them into manageable pieces.

3) Stuff the greens into canning jars. Add 1/2 t. salt per jar (optional) and cover with boiling water, leaving 1″ headspace. Don’t forget to remove the air bubbles. Adjust two-piece lids.
4) Transfer the jars to a rack on a pressure canner. Pour in 2 quarts of boiling water. Lock the lid into place, but do not place the regulator on the steam vent. Turn on the heat and exhaust steam from the vent for 10 minutes. Then place the regulator on the steam vent and bring the canner to 10 pounds of pressure. Start timing once the regulator starts rocking—70 minutes for pints, 90 minutes for quarts. (If this is confusing, see the step-by-step directions, with pictures, in this post.)
5) Turn off the heat and let the pressure drop of its own accord. When the pressure has dropped, remove the regulator. Now open all your windows. After waiting a few more minutes, open the lid away from your body. The pungent aroma of overcooked turnip greens will fill your house, and you’ll have all the shelf-stable greens you want. Plan on 2 to 5 pounds per pint, depending on the kind of greens involved. Um, yum?

Other ideas?

My problem, it turns out, is that I added turnip greens at the beginning, right along with the split peas, the potatoes, etc. Although we don’t think of them as such, it turns out that turnip greens are quite high in acid. The acid, in turn, makes it difficult for the split peas to absorb water. How difficult? Well. Let me tell you. These split peas—pre-soaked, mind you!—were still hard as rocks after 8 hours in the crockpot, at which point I turned it to low and we went out for pizza at our local brew pub instead. I let it cook overnight. The peas were still mostly hard the next morning, but by now the mixture had started to turn an alarming color. Determined not to waste food, I decided to pressure cook the whole thing. Five minutes at 15 pounds pressure did virtually nothing to the peas. After another 10 minutes, they were starting to soften, but still not done. Finally, after another 10 minutes at 15 pounds of pressure, they were finally soft enough to eat. They were also not very pretty.

The end product was edible, sort of, if you smother a bowl of the stuff with yogurt and chutney. But it is not something I will repeat.

The lesson? Only add acidic things (tomatoes, greens, lemon juice, etc.) to legumes after they’re cooked. This is the logic that explains, among other things, why recipes for baked beans usually either have you start with cooked beans or include a cooking time of several hours. Great mysteries revealed!

Now, to be honest, I’ve often had trouble getting beans soft in the crockpot, which is one of oh-so-many reasons I usually prefer the pressure cooker instead. How does this work, exactly? What tricks do you use?

You freeze beet greens just like you freeze turnip greens (or pretty much any kind of green, for that matter). Just clean them, cut off the stems (or keep them, if you like), blanch them in boiling water for about 1–2 minutes, then drain and chill in an ice bath. Transfer to freezer bags. Done! If you’re careful, you can cut back the beet tops several times through the growing season without affecting the size of the root. Mmmmm. More greens. Just freeze them now, and I promise—really and truly!—that you’ll love them this winter in soups, stews, and casseroles.