Recipe: Creole Mixed Greens

Mixed Greens have been a staple item on Southern dinner tables for decades.  Collards, along with Kale, Mustard Greens and Chard fill a very necessary role in proper nutrition providing Vitamins A & C along with Selenium and a whopping 25% your daily fiber (5.3g).  I have cooked green this way for years never really realizing that it is a traditional Creole Recipe dating back to the 1800's.  I've modified the recipe to reduce the sodium per serving.  The liquid on the bottom of the pan is called "pot likker" and is full of nutrients.  This dish is served with bread used to sop up the juices or my wife likes to have it over rice.

Creole Yam Casserole

This is a recipe I've used a couple of times.  It's got many names and variations but I call it Creole because of the use of a praline pecan topping.  Basically imagine it's a crustless sweet potato pie and it makes a nice sweet counterpart to the more savory items on a holiday table.

The Veg-All News

Here's a recipe that needs to stay forgotten in history, they only thing that would make it more regrettable is if it was encased in Jello and molded into something ridiculous.   Let's open a can of veg all which looks like a concoction of kitchen scraps from the local restaurant and we'll serve it on a lettuce leaf with some mayonnaise topped with pimento... Yummy, or not. 

Maryland Zucchini Crabcakes

When times were tough and you couldn't afford to buy crab meat this neat little recipe stood in for the Authentic Crab Cake.  They are delicious in their own right and would probably fool someone who wasn't a native Marylander but since I'm from Baltimore I can say they don't fool me.  Don't let this dissuade you from trying them though as it's a great new way to use zucchini.  You will have to shred the zucchini and place in a towel 1 cup and time.  Fold the towel and make a ball squeezing very tightly to get out as much water as possible.  If you skimp in this step your crabcakes will come out too damp.

Eggplant Creole

Note: This recipe has been edited 12/18/14 from the original as I finally got it to come together the way the original was supposed to look like when finished.

This recipe is from a Crisco sponsored cookbook printed in the early 1920's.  When I first saw it I expected something spicy, after all it's Creole and Louisiana is known for it's fiery foods but in this case Creole seems to be mean cooked with tomatoes.  I made this recipe the way the original was laid out but immediately saw the need for some changes as the cooking directions are rather vague as vintage recipes are wont to be and it also calls for the boiling of the eggplant which was something of a disaster (We now boil the eggplant, see below).  Keep this in mind when you make it that this is the modified, kitchen tested recipe which is what sets this blog apart from other vintage recipe sites.  This recipe was a side dish in it's original form but by the 1930's the Great Depression had turned it into a main dish.  I ate it with a poached egg on top and it is both a nutritious and filling meal that doesn't cost that much.  This recipe lived on into the 1960's where it appears again in another of my cookbooks returning to it's roots as a side dish.

Recipe: Creole Mustard Greens

Makes an interesting presentation

I've been on a "greens" kick lately and after the Collard Green Recipe was a success dad mentioned that he had never had mustard greens before and neither had I.  So I decided to look into it and find something that sounded at least halfway decent.  I'm sorry, I really don't cook my greens with ham hocks, salt pork, fatback or smoked turkey legs because I can't stomach the 2 weeks worth of sodium intake that using such meats adds to the recipe.  I do, however, like using bacon and after digging up the collard greens recipe last week I found out using bacon is Creole Style.