Collard Greens and Wookie Hybrids

Last night we had a really great dinner which I thought I would go ahead and share with you all. It's not for everyone... it's healthy and it's pretty weird. But if you have a bit of imagination when it comes to food it's quite yummy and you can think up a ton of variations for the recipe.

Anyway... we made burritos out of collard greens. You just steam the whole leaves (for those of you who don't normally partake of the collard green... the leaves are huge.) Then you can fill them much the same way as a tortilla with whatever the heck you want. We filled ours with a mix of mozzarella and Colby cheeses, brown rice, roasted poblano pepper, kidney beans and tempeh baked in red chile enchilada sauce. You roll these babies up and you are in business. We thought of another variation to try next time... you could do a Thai version with peanut sauce and veggies and some sort of chicken meat substitute (or actual chicken of course, if you are not a veggie) or whatever strikes your fancy. The greens hold together really well for the wrap and they are so freakin' good for you it isn't funny. Here's a few pics of ours. Not the best pics I have ever taken of a dinner we have prepared but they will give you the general idea of the thing. The first pic is pre-roll... there are two lined up on the plate for rollin'.




And here is a half devoured roll...so you can see the burrito-ness of it all...



BTW, I just steamed those greens in a microwave steamer for 6 minutes with a bit of water and they cam out perfect. I had quite a pile of greens... if you only have a few leaves to steam 3 minutes would probably be sufficient.

While we are on the subject of collard green burritos we may as well also discuss this...



Everyday it seems to be more apparent that Rudy is morphing into some sort of Wookie (Chewbacca) type creature... possibly cross bred with a frog? A toad? A Shih Tzu which has been bred with a cat fish? Anyway... things get curiouser and curiouser in the visual department of our canine catastrophe. Wookies are normally quite tall and long legged. But I do believe we have a newly modified midget version on our hands here...




If we can teach him to walk upright and fit him with an ammo belt we could really have something here. Too bad the Star Wars series has been filmed to completion.