Preparing Greens for Recipes

Fall weather brings in a mountain of greens – spinach, chard, kale, choi. This last box, we received four bags of greens! In the past few weeks, I’ve been preparing a number of recipes that call for chopped, frozen spinach (be on the lookout for a Spanakopita recipe and a recipe for Baked Pasta with Chard). But since I have a lot of fresh greens, I started blanching and chopping my own greens and using them interchangeably in recipes. You can use this technique to prepare fresh greens and immediately incorporate them into a recipe or you can freeze the already prepped greens for later use. Defrost and use just like chopped, frozen spinach.

The tool pictured above is great for pressing out excess moisture from greens. A potato ricer turns out these perfect disks of greens, ready for chopping or freezing.

Click here to download and print a pdf of this technique:

Preparing Greens for Recipes