Category Archives: Poultry

Spicy Asian Lettuce Wraps

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I love lettuce cups or wraps.  When I go out to dinner,  I’m the only one at the table usually that orders it.  I don’t know why.  Maybe when people order an appetizer, they are looking to be naughty and order the calorie rich lobster bisque, supreme nachos, crab dip or something similar.  Maybe lettuce wraps are too “salady” and you don’t want an appetizer salad to be followed by an actual salad.  I’m just at such a loss because these are amazingly good, yet pretty “healthy”, for an appetizer.

I started this blog to push myself outside my comfort zone and make food for dinner that is simple, healthy, and different.  Keep the same old, same old to a minimum.  This is the first time I’ve made this recipe and I was really pleased with it.  Very easy to make, extremely good. The dish is sweet with a hint of spicy and great Asian flavor, wrapped in crunchy lettuce. After grating the ginger and mincing the garlic, my husband said that whatever I was cooking smelled delicious!   Your kitchen will smell amazing as this is cooking.  There aren’t too many odd ingredients and the whole dish is fairly low carb, if you care about that.  As a bonus, both the kids and my husband loved it!!

The recipe was inspired by Mark Masumoto’s recipe on the PBS website: http://www.pbs.org/food/fresh-tastes/spicy-chicken-lettuce-cups/  PBS is  one of the few channels that features people actually cooking with real ingredients.

Spicy Asian Lettuce Wraps
Serves 4-6
Prep Time: 15 minutes
Cook time: 30 minutes

2 heads iceberg or butter leaf lettuce
2 pounds ground chicken (you can also use ground pork or crumbled firm tofu)
4 tablespoons hoisin sauce
3 tablespoons soy sauce
1 teaspoons corn starch
2 teaspoons Sriracha
1/4 cup peanut or vegetable oil
5 cloves garlic, finely minced
2 tablespoons finely minced ginger
5 ounces sliced shiitake mushrooms
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 scallions, sliced thin
1 avocado, diced
1/4 cup cilantro
1 carrot, shredded

Remove leaves from head of lettuce, rinse and dry. Set aside.

In a medium bowl, combine ground chicken, hoisin sauce, soy sauce, corn starch, and Sriracha. Set aside.

In a large skillet, heat oil. Add garlic and ginger to the hot oil and cook until they begin to turn light brown. Add mushrooms and salt. Cook until the mushrooms begin to get soft (you may need to add more oil to prevent sticking if you don’t use a nonstick pan). Add the chicken mixture to the pan. Cook until the chicken is cooked through, using a wooden spoon to cut the chicken into small pieces as it cooks.

Assemble lettuce wraps by adding the meat to a lettuce leaf and top with scallions, avocado, cilantro, and carrots.

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Greek Chicken

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As I was walking through my local Whole Foods the other day, I marveled at all the amazing food and how really beautiful the produce section of a good grocery store can be.  From the beautiful Fennel fronds, to the orange carrots, yellow bananas, purple blueberries, and red cherries and tomatoes, you can truly find some amazing variety in nature.  Of course, my perusing of the produce section was more time waster than deep reflection.  How often does a working mom get to be alone, at her own pace, and just wander?

Obviously not often if my gold standard is wandering through the produce section unmolested by cries of “I want!”  So, I had to snap out of my blissful haze before I lost any more time.  Honestly, I think the samples must be filled with magical lotus leaves.  I lose all kind of time there and I can’t really tell you that I was doing anything particular.

I was there to get dinner.  It doesn’t make itself, you know.   I walked past the fish and meat counter and nothing really jumped out.  Then, in one of the open refrigerators a small sign:  chicken legs, $.69/pound.  Really?!?  Chicken rated a 2 on the animal welfare scale for less than a buck a pound?   Sure, it was just chicken legs, but who can beat that deal?  I picked up a super sized package and went on my way.    What would I do with a whole bunch of chicken legs?

Sure, I could fry them, but I did that already.  Coq Au Vin?  Done.  I’m not stripping the meat off of them for gumbo.    So, I did what any respectable blogger would do, I googled “chicken legs”.    And there, in my search result was a recipe from Goop, a website run by Gwyneth Paltrow.  At this point, I must confess to a guilty pleasure of reading gossip sites.  These sites generally don’t like Gwyneth Paltrow.  In fact, they love pointing out that she’s fairly unaware that “peasants” don’t live like her.  We don’t cleanse, have a nanny (or two), aren’t married to a rock star, can’t choose which city to live in this week (London or NYC, so hard, right?), and don’t spend $458,000 on a “Spring Essentials collection” of clothes for just this Spring.  To paraphrase from the many Goop-haters, when you are born on third base, don’t think you hit a triple in life or that scoring a run is hard from that beginning position.  An example of her being “out of touch” (if the Spring Essentials didn’t drive that point home) may be the $950 silver shot cup that is part, just part, of her barware.   So, as a working mom who’s clearly not in the 1% scrambling to make dinner with cheap chicken legs on a busy weeknight, it was with great trepidation I clicked on the Goop link http://www.goop.com/journal/make/215/one-pan-meals.

Ultimately, I’m very glad I took a chance with this recipe. It’s really quite good and so ridiculously simple. This is based on a traditional Greek dish called Kapama. However, it is a bit of a shocking recipe.  Cinnamon, chicken, tomatoes and garlic.  In one pot.  One of my sorority sisters has a website called http://thefamilymealproject.com/ that examines what meals her kids would eat.  Well, I felt this would be a perfect recipe for that experiment.  As the house filled with the scent of cinnamon and tomato, I started to fret a bit.  It was a wonderful smell, just not something you expect.  You know, for dinner.  However, I received nothing but absolute praise from both my son and daughter.  My very picky, I only eat salmon daughter actually ate this.  I know, shocking.  The hubs gave his equivalent of a rave review:  I’d ask you to make it again.  Sigh.  Small victory, I will take thee!!

Cinnamon Braised Chicken Legs

6-8 Chicken Legs (what will fit in your dutch oven, and you can use any chicken parts you have handy)
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
1/4 cup olive oil
1 medium onion, diced
5 cloves of garlic, minced
2 15 ounce cans of diced tomatoes
1/2 cup water or chicken stock
1 cinnamon stick
1/2 cup romano cheese, grated
Salt and Pepper

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Rinse and pat dry the chicken legs, set aside. Combine cinnamon, salt and pepper in a small bowl. Sprinkle cinnamon mixture over the chicken liberally.

Heat the oil in a dutch oven (I used my trusty 5 quart) over medium high heat. Brown the chicken, in batches. About a minute or so on each side. Remove from pan and set aside. Reduce heat to medium. To the pan, add the onions and cook while stirring until translucent. Add the garlic and soften. Add the tomatoes and the water and deglaze the pan. Add the cinnamon stick and bring to a simmer. Return the chicken to the pan. Cover and place in the oven and cook for one to two hours until cooked through or all the way to “fall off the bone”. Serve with pasta or rice and sprinkle with cheese before serving.

Note: I only cooked this in the oven for an hour. “Fall off the bone” would have taken too much time for a weeknight meal. In the hour it was cooking, I made brown rice, a salad and checked homework. Two hours and we would have been eating well after the kids’ bedtime. So, it might be even better with more time!

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Coq Au Vin

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One of my earliest cooking memories revolves around a very old set of cookbooks.  I want to say they were Time Life’s World Cookbooks or something like that.  These cookbooks seemed so much fancier than our trusty red and white checkered Better Homes and Gardens’ New Cookbook.  So, of course I poured over them more.  The red checked book seemed so, well, American.

The cookbooks were divided by country and there was an entire cookbook dedicated to French Cooking.  As a child who’s most exotic meals were tacos or spaghetti, these cookbooks seemed other worldly.    So, one night I asked my mom if we could make something out of the French cookbook… and I kept asking for a while until she finally relented.  The most exotic recipe to me (I was probably all of 8 or 9 years old) was Coq Au Vin.  Chicken in Red Wine.  To go with it, Chocolate Mousse.  I’d never had chocolate mousse, but had heard of it.  I had chocolate pudding, but was pretty sure mousse was somehow better. My parents were beer drinkers, so we got cooking wine for the red wine…  I know, stop laughing.  But this was the 70s and, well, we didn’t know.  Why would they sell it if it wasn’t good?

So, that was my first foray into French cooking:  making a recipe from Time Life with supermarket cooking wine.   We weren’t exactly well to do, and, at the time it was a fairly expensive meal.  So, my parents were very kind to indulge me.   For the record, the chocolate mousse was amazing.  To this day I remember that meal.  I was so proud to make it.  I felt truly grown up.

In the many years since then, cooking Coq Au Vin, made famous in the States by Julia Child, seems odd and quant.  Like a 70s fondue party.   I’m almost sheepish about telling people I eat this dish, much less make it.   This is another recipe like my 40 Cloves of Garlic Chicken that really should be in the rotation.  It deserves a spot in your repertoire!  While it is an old dish, and old dishes are not fussy.  There’s no crazy ingredient you’ll only use one and rue the rest of the time it’s in your pantry (looking at you walnut oil!).  The ingredients are fairly cheap and easy to come by, depending, of course, on the type of wine you use.

Coq Au Vin is normally made with a tough, old bird.  It’s rare to come across those nowadays, although my farmer’s market does have a great guy that sells “stewing hens”.  So, I use chicken thighs.  Today’s chicken breasts get woefully overcooked in this dish and can’t really stand up to the red wine.  You also don’t have to simmer the chicken as long, because the chicken isn’t really “old” anymore and becomes tender rather quickly.

I will admit to a cheat. Julia Childs starts this recipe off by rendering the fat off of carefully sliced lardons. As someone who is always looking to maximize my food use, I fastidiously save the bacon fat every time I cook bacon. So, I can skip the rendering step and shave about 20 minutes off the cook time.  If you don’t have bacon drippings, please render away!
Coq Au Vin
Serves 6

1/4 cup rendered bacon fat (may substitute any vegetable oil that can handle high heat, like canola)
6 chicken thighs
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
3 stalks of celery, coarsely chopped
2 carrots, coarsely chopped
1 small onion, small dice
3 cloves of garlic, minced
3 cups of red wine
2 bay leaves
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1 cup of water or chicken stock
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons flour

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Heat bacon fat in an enameled dutch oven over medium high heat. Sprinkle chicken thighs with salt and pepper and place in the pan skin side down when fat sizzles on contact with chicken. Cook chicken until the skin is a golden brown and flip over. Cook the other side until golden as well. Remove the chicken to a platter and set aside.

Saute celery, carrots and onions until the celery is soft. Reduce heat to medium. Add the garlic, stirring to prevent it from burning. When the garlic becomes fragrant, add the red wine, bay leaves and dried thyme and bring to a simmer. Return the chicken to the pan. If the wine does not almost cover the chicken, add the water or chicken stock. Otherwise, you can omit. Cover and place in the oven to finish cooking the chicken through, about 40 minutes.

Remove the chicken from the pot, cover and set aside.  Combine flour and butter together.  Whisk into the red wine sauce and cook until slightly thickened and glossy.  Serve chicken with sauce.

Julia Child’s recommends serving this dish with braised mushrooms and brown braised onions. I made those by sautéing the onions in butter and adding quartered mushrooms and cooking them over medium heat for about 20 minutes. In the pictures, the vegetables in the back are roasted carrots and parsnips. I just heated the oven to 375, roughly chopped the vegetables, covered with oil olive and salt and pepper, and roasted for 20 minutes until browned. I shook the pan occasionally. All told, the dinner took about 90 minutes, but most of that was the chicken cooking in the oven, not active prep time.

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Chicken Pot Pie

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It’s 5 o’clock and I’m staring the fridge, hoping for a revelation as to what to make for dinner.  I’ve got left over chicken thighs.  Every other protein source is froze solid.  So, I thought, what to do with you?  The kids can’t stand chicken salad.  So, I decided to make Chicken Pot Pie.  There were a variety of old recipes that involved the entire chicken being in the pot and covered with crust.  That seemed a little, um, rustic.

I remembered the pies of my childhood.  You know the ones in the box of the freezer section.  Crust, bits of chicken and random veggies with a creamy broth in a pie shape.  As a kid, these things are amazing.  As an adult, well, here’s the ingredients for Swanson’s Chicken Pot Pie:

Ingredients (75):

Water, Flour Enriched (Wheat Flour, Niacin, Ferrous Sulfate, Thiamine Mononitrate (Vitamin B1),Riboflavin (Vitamin B2), Folic Acid (Vitamin aB)) , Chicken Cooked (Chicken Meat Dark, Salt, Soy Protein Isolate, Carrageenan, Food Starch Modified, Sodium Phosphate, Spice(s) Extract) ,Carrot(s), Potato(es), Sodium Pyrophosphate, Shortening (Lard, Lard Hydrogenated,Soybean(s) Oil Partially Hydrogenated) , Chicken Cooked Mechanically Separated, Food Starch Modified, Chicken Base (Wheat Flour Bleached Enriched [Barley Malted Flour,Potassium Bromate, Niacin, Iron Reduced, Thiamine Mononitrate (Vitamin B1), Riboflavin (Vitamin B2)] , Salt, Maltodextrin, Whey Powder, Whey Protein Concentrate, Garlic Powder, Soy Lecithin, Yeast Extract, Onion(s) Powder, Annatto, Spice(s), Turmeric Extract, Xanthan Gum) ,Contains 22% or less Peas, Chicken Fat, Dextrose, Flavor(s) Natural and Artificial Chicken(Salt, Chicken Powder, Chicken Fat, Yeast Extract Autolyzed, Water, Flavor(s) Natural & Artificial, Sugar Invert, Chicken Broth, Onion(s) Powder, Flavor(s) Grill [Soybean(s) Oil Partially Hydrogenated, Cottonseed Oil Partially Hydrogenated] , Cottonseed Oil Partially Hydrogenated, Soybean(s) Oil Partially Hydrogenated, Tocopherols) , Salt, Dough Conditioner(s) (Sodium Aluminosilicate, Salt, Wheat Gluten Vital, Enzyme(s), Soy Protein Flour,Ammonium Sulfate, Fumaric Acid) , Caramel Color, Annatto for color retention

Oh my.

So, I gathered my ingredients on hand and transformed tired leftovers into something that used to be quite common place, but is now very exotic:  a chicken pot pie.  The kids were amazed at the transformation of such humdrum ingredients.  In going through the historic cookbooks, “pot pies” were rather common place.  I find them to be an efficient use of leftovers!! I’ll put measurements on here, but really, it’s all about what you have on hand.

Chicken Pot Pie
Serves 6

1/2 recipe Pie Crust, or a 9 inch pie crust

1/4 cup high heat tolerant cooking fat (lard, bacon drippings, vegetable oil)
3 carrots, sliced thin
3 celery stalks, sliced thin
1 medium onion, small dice
1 8 ounce container of mushrooms, sliced
1-2 pounds cooked chicken, cubed
1/2 teaspoon dried sage, crushed
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme, crushed
2 tablespoons flour
2 cups heavy cream
Salt and Pepper

1 egg
1 tablespoon water

Preheat oven to 350 degrees fahrenheit

Place the cooking fat in a sauté pan over medium heat. When heated, add the carrots, celery, onion and mushroom. Sauté, stirring occasionally, until the carrots and celery are soft (or the texture you like them), about 15-20 minutes.

Add the chicken, sage and thyme, cook until fragrant. Add the flour and cook for a bit until the raw flour taste is cooked out.

Add the heavy cream and cook. The sauce will thicken. You want the sauce to continue to thicken as it cooks, about 5-10 minutes. Taste and season with salt and pepper as needed.

Place the mixture in a oven proof pan (I used a large soufflé dish) and smooth the top.

Roll out the pie crust and drape over the top of the baking dish. Pinch the crust over the top of the dish to hold the crust firm.

In a small bowl, beat the egg and water together and brush on pie crust.

Cut a vent slit in the crust, and place the dish on a cookie sheet. Bake until the crust is golden brown, about 30 minutes.

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40 Cloves of Garlic Chicken

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAOne of the main reasons I started this blog was to add some creativity to my cooking.  Day after day making and eating the same stuff was becoming tedious.  Old cookbooks give me great inspiration.   They don’t have 100s of ingredients using various and sundry appliances that I don’t have (or frankly, want).   If you google this recipe, you will see what modern chefs have done to it.   Some have made it ridiculously hard with lots of steps and expensive ingredients.  Frankly, it’s a travesty.  If you are tired of plain old chicken, give this recipe a try.  It’s easy, crazy good, and fairly cheap eats. If you are lucky and can eat carbs, this dish is made to have the cooked garlic smashed across some wonderful, crusty French bread. The bread can also be used to soak up the amazing sauce created by this dish.  If you are no carbing it, the smashed garlic is still wonderful to combine with the chicken.

Serve with a salad or steamed veggie and dinner is complete.

I’ve made this recipe to fit a 5 quart dutch oven.  The recipe is very scalable for other sizes. It’s adapted from James Beard’s 40 Cloves of Garlic Chicken recipe.
40 Cloves of Garlic Chicken

3 stalks of celery, rough chop
1 large onion, medium dice
1 tablespoon dried tarragon
7 chicken thighs (could be 6 or eight, whatever fits)
1/4 cup dry vermouth
1/2 cup olive oil
Salt and Pepper
40 cloves of garlic, unpeeled (or however many you have)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Place celery, onion, tarragon in the dutch oven. Top with the chicken thighs. Pour vermouth over thighs, then pour the oil. Season thighs to taste.

Tuck unwrapped garlic into every nook and cranny.

Cover the dutch oven and bake until the chicken is done, about 60 minutes.

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Maryland Fried Chicken

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Welcome to my first blog post!   I love history and cooking and marrying these two loves has led me to some interesting reads.  Namely, very old cookbooks.   Luckily, there is a wonderful program at Michigan State University that has put many old cookbooks online.  Reading them is a revelation.  Cookbooks served many purposes.  Not only were they collections of recipes, but also household cleaning and staff supervision.  Many authors of these historical cookbooks admonish young housewives to make sure they know how to execute the recipes and not be completely dependent on household servants, as you may not always be able to afford servants.

Now, I have no servants.  I’m on no quest like cooking every recipe from a particular cookbook.  What I would like to do is explore American cooking before it became corrupted by what I like to call the “Food Industrial Complex” or “Big Food”.    Processed and “convenience” food have handicapped our ability to feed ourselves wholesome food.   When I see a kid eat a homemade chocolate chip cookie and ask what brand it is, I am heartbroken.  People used to make waffles, bread and cookies. Sure, in our carb and gluten adverse world, these are fairly evil items.  But kids who don’t realize that cookies can be made miss out on the best cookies of all.  Nothing beats a homemade chocolate chip cookie out of the oven.  Nothing.

So, where do I start?   Today, I write about a mystery for the ages.  The mystery goes by many aliases:  Maryland Fried Chicken, Chicken Maryland, Maryland Chicken, and Chicken a la Maryland.   I am from Maryland and whenever I traveled out of state and saw some version of this chicken dish on a menu I was perplexed.  Sure, who hasn’t heard of Kentucky Fried Chicken or Southern Fried Chicken?  My favorite fried chicken is from Popeye’s.  But fried chicken “a la Maryland”?  Usually anything tagged with “Maryland” as a descriptor meant it either had crab or the “Old Bay” seasonings in it.  Frankly, I am probably one of the few people from my home state to really not like “Old Bay”.  But, I digress.

So, I set out to find the origins of Chicken Maryland.  Believe it or not, Chicken Maryland appears in many esteemed cookbooks.  Escoffier’s Ma Cuisine, Fanny Farmer’s The Boston Cooking School Cook Book and James Beard’s American Cookery, all have a version or mention of Chicken Maryland.  I love Beard’s introduction to this apparently, unbeknownst to me, iconoclastic dish:

There are so many recipes for fried chicken, but none is as famous as Chicken Maryland.  Strange as it may seem, no two recipes have any similarity when you compare them.  Furthermore, there is no other American chicken recipe quite so internationally famous as Chicken a la Maryland.

How internationally famous?  Well, it was on the menu for the Titanic the day it sank.  Keep in mind, Farmer wrote her book in 1892, the Titanic sank in 1912, Escoffier’s Ma Cuisine was published in 1934 and Beard’s American Cookery in 1972.

Yet, as a native Marylander I have no idea what Chicken Maryland is.  I asked around and I am not alone.   How sad that an apparently once famous a dish is so forgotten.

After perusing several sources, it seems that Beard is correct, there are tons of versions.  Most, however, coalesce around a general idea.  The chicken is not deep fried, it’s pan fried, the steamed by putting a cover over the pan.  So, the chicken is both fried and steamed.  Now, there is general disagreement as to the frying oil (butter, clarified butter, and “drippings”) and the method of breading.  To further complicate matters, many of these recipes give a guide as to how to make it, but ingredient measures seem to be something the reader is presumed to know.

So, I attempted to resurrect Chicken Maryland or Chicken a la Maryland from the dustbin of history and I must confess, it’s pretty awesome.  Crispy and moist without being overly greasy.  Why this isn’t the preferred method of cooking over deep frying is really quite a mystery.

I like to cook a whole meal instead of just a recipe.  So, to accompany Chicken a la Maryland, I made kale and collard greens (recipe below).

Chicken a la Maryland

My biggest issue with fried chicken is the mess.  There’s leftover oil that I suppose I could strain and reserve for another use.  But that’s really high maintenance and frankly, I don’t make it that often to keep old grease sitting around.  Then there’s the oil splatter all over the stove.  Add to that my insecurity over whether the chicken is actually done, and, let’s just say fried chicken in our house is synonymous with “Popeye’s”.

Chicken a la Maryland answers every one of my issues with fried chicken.  First, there’s no oil and very little mess leftover.  The chicken pieces are also “done” with very little effort or clean up.

In order to avoid multiple, different cooking times, I bought chicken thighs.  They are cheap and stand up well to heat.   You could certainly use any other favorite part and have great results.

2 cups Buttermilk

6 chicken thighs

2 cups flour

1 teaspoon paprika

½ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon pepper

2 large eggs

2 tablespoons water

2 cups bread crumbs (I used Panko style)

½ stick of butter (clarified butter may be easier to work with)

6 mushrooms, sliced

1 cup heavy cream

Salt and pepper

Place chicken thighs in buttermilk and soak for 2 hours.  Combine flour, paprika, salt and pepper on a large plate. Combine eggs and water in a wide, shallow bowl.  Place bread crumbs on a plate.

Remove chicken from buttermilk and dredge in flour mixture, then egg mixture, then bread crumbs and set aside.

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Melt the butter in a 10 inch heavy cast iron skillet.  When bubbling, add chicken.  Depending on the size of your pan, the chicken may need to be broken up into separate batches.

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Brown both sides of the chicken.  Turn down heat to medium low.  With the chicken positioned skin side up, place a lid on the chicken and let steam for 20 minutes, checking occasionally to make sure the bottoms are not burning.

Remove the chicken. Add mushrooms to the pan and sauté until soft.   Add about 4 tablespoons of flour to create a roux.   Cook until the raw flour taste is removed, but not so much that the roux has darkened.  Add 1 cup of heavy cream to the pan and whisk.  If the cream gravy is too thick, thin with additional cream.  Salt and pepper to taste. Serve chicken with gravy and collard greens.

Notes

  • I think this recipe would be pretty adaptable to gluten free cooking.  Cornstarch could sub for the initial flour coating and used as a thickening agent for the gravy.  Gluten free bread crumbs are readily available as well for the coating.
  • I made this in both a cast iron fry pan and an all clad 4 quart sauté pan.  The cast iron pan yielded much better results.  The butter didn’t burn and neither did the chicken.  If you don’t have cast iron, definitely use clarified butter and be very mindful of the chicken while the pan is covered.  You may want to put the covered pan in the oven at 350° F for the 20 minutes, instead of keeping it on the stove.

Kale and Collard Greens

I wanted to highlight the chicken recipe on this post; however, I made the Kale and Collard Greens first, and as it was cooking, made the chicken.  The meal was all finished at the same time.

Collard Greens and Kale

¼ cup leftover bacon fat (or render 4-5 slices of bacon)

1 medium onion, sliced

2 stalks of celery, chopped fine

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 teaspoon dried thyme (optional)

1 bay leaf

2 cups of water

2 cups of chicken broth

1 bunch of kale

1 bunch of collard greens

Salt and Pepper

In an 8 quart pan, heat bacon grease on medium heat.  When the grease is moderately hot, add onions and celery.  Sauté the vegetables until the onions are translucent and the celery is soft, reduce heat if necessary.

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Once the vegetables are sufficiently soft, reduce heat to low medium and add the garlic, thyme and bay leaf.  Once the garlic and spices and incorporated, but before the garlic burns, add the water and stock and simmer.  While the liquid is simmering, remove the kale and collard leaves from their tough stems and rinse.   Add the greens to the liquid and reduce heat to low, stirring occasionally to wilt the leaves.   Cook until leaves are tender, keeping watch on the liquid level.  Do not allow the water to completely evaporate, add more water during cooking if needed. Prior to serving, salt and pepper to taste.

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