Though not part of our family menus while growing up, later in life with my adult appetite I learned how much I like “boiled greens” as a side dish. A true Southern menu favorite of ages old and still today, collard greens, mustard greens and turnip greens are the prime trio.
I liken them to spinach, which was a rotating vegetable side dish on Mom’s menus.
My first taste of grazing on greens was more than 25 years ago while writing a restaurant review for a new “soul food” dining destination in Chicago. Later, my fondness for these flavorful cooked-down leaves grew even more after enjoying them as a menu staple of the Sunday afternoon opening cast parties, catered alongside chicken wings and sweet potatoes at the request of Jackie Taylor, founder of Black Ensemble Theater in Chicago, in celebration of her unveiling her latest production.
I also gave “greens” their due as a favorite highlight of the now faded and forgotten Paula Deen restaurants in our area, both closed a decade ago but once busy buffets at Harrah’s Casino and Hotel in Joliet and sister location at Horseshoe Casino in Hammond. Of course, add enough bacon drippings, butter, seasonings and salted pork to any stack of simmered green leaves and the resulting taste will be delectable.
The neighboring spring landscape just down the road by our family farm is bursting with color this week courtesy of blooming turnip greens, in this case prized and purposed as a perfect temporary field crop as “ground cover.”
Our peppermint farming friends Larry and Debbie Wappel have used this nature’s nutrients rotating option for farm fields for years, but I’ve never noticed as much vibrant field color as this year in their 80-acre field near their peppermint still and farm operations buildings along Indiana 10 in our small farming town of San Pierre.
Flowering turnips provide key “cover crop” spring ground cover at the Wappel Farm in San Pierre with beauty and the added benefits of being nitrogen-rich for the soil, yielding yellow blooms backed with pollen to attract bees and much-needed other helpful pollinators. (Debbie Wappel)
Larry told me there are more than 20 mixed ground cover seeds sewn into the field, including alfalfa and the tall blooming turnips, the latter of which dominates as the focal points. Larry said the turnips are helpful to the soil for a number of reasons in the spring, especially since they are rich in nitrogen and also anchor the topsoil to prevent the loss of blowing dirt and sand from spring winds. Once the soil has started to dry from our very wet spring rains of late, the field will be planted in corn or soybeans.
“I call this field our ‘farm field salad bowl’ because the wildlife love it, from birds and bees to the deer and rabbits,” Larry said.
Bees are especially fond of turnip blooms because the blossoms rank among the heartiest for pollen saturation, which makes the workload easy for “busy bees” and our other important winged pollinators.
Just as the eaten leaves of turnips are high in iron and vitamins, the pollen extracted from turnip blooms is high in protein and amino acids, with the added benefit of being easily digestible, all attributes crediting the pollen of turnip blooms as “pollen power.”
Even though turnip greens might not have ranked among my mom’s rotating recipes for the kitchen favorites of my youth, her recipe for round steak in rich brown gravy always hit as a top request.
Columnist Philip Potempa’s mother Peggy has made her family favorite recipe for baked round steak served in a rich and savory mushroom gravy for more than six decades. (Philip Potempa/for Post-Tribune)
Reviewing my four published “From the Farm” cookbooks and the more than 1,000 recipes I’ve highlighted in print the past 22 years, I was surprised recently to find I’d not ever previously included Mom’s baked round steak recipe. This is a similar circumstance I reported in a February column when I discovered I’d never shared her recipe for slow-roasted rump roast.
Just as surprising was my own quest last month to find round steak packaged and available at the meat counter of any of our local grocery stores in Northwest Indiana. Growing up, packaged round steak was a common purchase of menu-planning and cost-conscious cooks.
Eventually, I found cuts of round steak, but to my disappointment, gone from the steak was the signature “round bone” nestled in the meat cut. The round bone is just a sawed circle shape portion of the femur leg bone of the beef cattle and rich with the interior sweet white bone marrow.
Once cooked, our mom would bestow the distinct shaped bone to our always eager and appreciative collie of the moment.
Columnist Philip Potempa has published four cookbooks and is the director of marketing at Theatre at the Center. He can be reached at pmpotempa@comhs.org or mail your questions: From the Farm, PO Box 68, San Pierre, Ind. 46374.
Peggy’s Beef Round Steak in Gravy
Makes 8-10 servings
4 pounds round sirloin steak, cut into pieces
2 tablespoons cooking oil
Sprinkle of garlic powder
1 onion, chopped
1 package (1-ounce) envelope dry onion soup mix
1 teaspoon black pepper
2 cups sliced fresh or frozen mushrooms (optional)
4 cups water (divided use)
3 tablespoons cornstarch
3 teaspoons gravy browning
Directions:
1. Using a covered Dutch oven, add oil and place in steaks, sprinkling with garlic powder.
2. Place on stove and brown all sides of roast to seal in juices.
3. Heat oven to 350 degrees and add to the roasting pot the chopped onions, black pepper, the dried onion soup mix and 3 cups of water. Bake for 1 hour covered.
4. Remove from oven, add mushrooms and bake an additional 1-1/2 hours. Remove from oven and transfer steak onto a platter to cool slightly. Steak should be “fork tender.”
5. To make gravy, simmer remaining liquid with mushrooms from steak in Dutch oven on stove over medium heat, gradually stirring in cornstarch (to avoid lumps) and adding gravy browning for color.
6. Simmer until gravy thickens to desired consistency and return steak to gravy to serve with mashed potatoes and preferred vegetable side.
