Barley with Winter Greens Pesto

5 stars!  I was feeling like a big fatty so decided I needed to do another “cleanse” really a diet with a fancy name since I don’t really buy into the “you are bad at life because you sometimes eat and drink like a glutton” now cleanse!!  I gave up drinking for three weeks once with no discernible effect, wtf!  

Actually it’s more of a kick in the pants towards more healthy eating, blah, blah.  Enough about my eating habits on to the food….

I really got into barley in soups, cooking either vegetable soup with barley or beef barley soup.  So delicious and creamy and healthy and inexpensive and even trendy oh barley you are cooler than kale.  I saw this recipe when I was wasting time on Chow one day at work and saved it and it is awesome.  Ridiculously easy to make, delicious, filling.  I ate this stuff every day for at least a week and only got a tiny bit bored of it at the end.  Next time I will halve it.

I didn’t have walnut oil or sherry vinegar so replaced them with canola oil and what I thought was white wine vinegar but turned out to be rice wine vinegar.  Next time I will get the recommended oil and vinegar but in the meantime don’t let your lack of them stop you even with my substitutions it was delicious. 

Also, I had no idea how much my greens weighed so I used half a head each of mustard greens and swiss chard.

But, holy god, leave out that salt.  As I was dumping in those 2 whole teaspoons it just seemed like a lot and my barley ended up very salty. 

Here’s the link, make some tonight.

Greens with short rib sauce

Round two of short rib sauce:

After my short ribs cooking marathon I was left with gallons of sauce (exaggeration, maybe 3 pints) and some polenta.  I used up the rest of the polenta and some of the sauce by sautéing greens and adding that to the mix.  I froze the remainder of the sauce for the next time I am feeling like a red sauce dinner.

Here’s what I did:

1-2 cloves garlic

1 head mustard greens (or kale or swiss chard or spinach)

1 pint short rib sauce

Polenta (fresh or leftover)

Warm up the leftover sauce either on the stove or in the microwave.

While the sauce is heating up:

Swirl some olive oil in a sauté pan on medium heat, when the oil is warm add the garlic.  Allow the garlic to cook for no more than 30 seconds then add your favorite greens, chopped into bite sized pieces.  Give that a stir and cover until the greens are wilted.  Once the greens are wilted add the sauce to suate pan and allow everything to meld together for a few minutes over medium heat.

Ladle warm polenta into a bowl and top with a generous amount of saucy greens.  Finish it off with some fresh grated parmagiano and dig in. 

To reconstitute polenta I boil a small amount of water and broth and add that to the hardened polenta.  Stir until the polenta liquefies again.  Don’t use so much water that you have to “cook “ the polenta again.  You want just enough to soften the polenta and heat it through.  I find it easiest to boil the water in the teakettle and then add slowly to the polenta until I have enough to soften it up.