It ain’t easy being half-assed fresh when you’re born greasy. This is a recipe actually. Your psychic yokefellow is gonna do a produce order last week, because why buy produce at the grocery store when you can wholesale that shit and go straight to the produce man? You ask for turnip greens (feeling like an alternative to your standard bearer mustard greens), some mushrooms (maybe lion’s mane, or shiitake, the good shit), and fresh peas (meaning the little ball bearings of deliciousness). You end up getting collards, because they don’t have turnips, and your partner has them put back the lion’s mane, because it’s like “Epstein is my financial advisor” expensive. And you get sugar peas instead of ball bearing peas, but that’s okay, because you love them fuckers. You forget about the collards for a day or two, but then remember they’re about to go bad, so you gotta cook them. But then you see some smoked turkey legs on markdown at the grocery store, so you gotta get that to flavor the green. Anyways, first thing is you chop up a couple big ass sweet onions, like either the biggest two left in the onion crisper drawer, or if you don’t have big ones, then three of the other ones (2 bigs = 3 mids; standard dirtgod measurement). Let them sizzle on high heat in olive oil from the Afghan store (big glass gallon jug). Watch ‘em, because you don’t want them to burn. Start chopping collards. If the leaves are big as fuck, slice ‘em down the middle, then slice up the greens, keeping as much of the stem as you can. Stems are good, just slice ‘em thin enough to cook down. Your cutting board ain’t big enough to chop all the greens, so add it to the pot with the onions as necessary to keep the cutting board open for more super destruction of collards with your best knife (the one that can still accidentally break flesh, and nip off part of a fingernail). But you don’t wanna fry up greens necessarily, so keep the pot on high but add just enough chicken broth to almost cover what greens is already in the mix. Let that boil up while you keep chopping greens until you run out. My measurement for all this is for one big ass head of collards. If you have more than that, double up on the onions and other shit, but if you have any common sense about the kitchen, you already know that. Actually, if you know your way around the kitchen, you’ve probably already tuned this out, which is fine. I hate long ass explanations of recipes like you read online myself. But this isn’t actually a recipe; it’s about how hard it is to stay half-assed fresh when you’re born greasy. Once you got all the greens going, don’t let it boil on high, go ahead and cut it down to medium heat, or your preferred simmering heat. My “burner is on” light on the left side of the stove got stuck on last weekend, so it fucks up my flow on the stove. Shit freaks me out when I walk in the kitchen in the middle of the night when I wake up and need a drink because the CPAP cobra clutches all humidity from my body like an evil demon of medical advance. I go medium at this point, maybe a little less. Then you bust out the turkey legs, which to be honest, are one of the most annoying entities on earth, with all that succulent dark meat all weirdly entangled with those gristle bones that turkey legs got – too soft to be a full-on bone, but too cartilagey for my human teeth to gnaw through. And see, this is where the problem arises, because you’re in your fuzzy “I look like a teddy bear” Polo hoodie, which you wish you had 37 of, in a full array of colors, but you only got the one, so it’s gotta last you the rest of your life, since this is what you hope to be cremated in, this hoodie and your orange patch motif overalls. You kinda like the purple patch motif overalls more, but that one has base layer of blue denim overalls, while the orange patch one has base layer of that brown duck fabric, so it matches the brown “I look like a teddy bear” Polo hoodie better. Anyways, you don’t wanna be stripping turkey meat from cartilage with your bare hands, getting greasier and greasier, while wearing the Polo hoodie, so you take it off, and drape it over a chair. But you’ve got a Polo long sleeve like fake long john material underneath, and that’s pretty nice, too, and mostly white, which good lord, why would somebody like me even try to own white clothes? It’s a losing effort. So you take that off, too, and drape it over the chair as well. Now, it’s like been cold as fuck, so you’ve got the heat set at 60, because you can’t afford to be heating the whole ass house all the time (again, Epstein is not your financial advisor; empty pickle gallon jar in the bedroom, half full of change is). But you find yourself wrestling the meat off some smoked turkey legs, to chop up and put in the greens, bare-skinned from the waist up, as all good men in the kitchen should be ideally. I actually think the toxic masculine-induced shame most men feel about not wearing a shirt, which has led to a whole slew of dudes going swimming with shirts one (which is weird as hell), also contributes to how we are not comfortable being shirtless in the kitchen. Fuck that shit, let your gut out, and get to fixin’ some more things to stuff into it. Eventually you get most all the good meat off the turkey legs, and into the pot, which is now in that like 1/3 of the way between medium and low but on the medium side of my stove (fancy people may have fancier dials where the “in use” light actually goes off and them flat stovetops that look like spaceships have, so adjust my dial instructions as your current economic standing in the dying American empire dictates). The dog that’s been on the runner out back can smell all this shit going on inside, so is barking to come in. Go ahead and throw the smoked turkey bones into another small pot to boil up briefly, to drive the dog crazy. But then cool that pot down, so you can put the dog back on the runner and throw the turkey bone out to them. Bougie folks (dog moms and dads) don’t like to feed their dogs poultry bones, because they’re afraid it’ll do damage and they’ll have to take the dog to the vet, but true country people never take their animals to the vet, and also know life is a gamble, but you gotta live the way you wanna live, and that dog wants them turkey legbones. So you throw them in the yard, with the dog back on the runner, and the collards are slow cooking on the stove, filling the whole house with smells, so that when you walk to the back door to make sure the dog didn’t choke on a turkey bone and is dead out there, you think, “Haha, no Xes on the dog’s eyes,” like they are a cartoon. But then the smell is so good that when you turn around, you float up into the air and your nose pulls your body back into the kitchen, nose first, like six feet in the air, and you almost hit your head on the top of the doorways because your eyes are closed, and your nose is leading the way, but somehow you don’t, and it smells so fuckin’ good. But you can’t eat it for another 4 or 5 hours. In fact, the true cook time of collard greens is sort of like a mini-Ramadan, in that you deny yourself the indulgences of the greens for as long as possible, so that it can cook down to its purest essence, and be entirely flavored with the turkey as well as additional spices you add (black pepper, definitely some cayenne), so that once you finally break your temporary fast and enjoy a flat bowl (not a deep bowl, but not a plate, somewhere in the middle aka a flat bowl) of collards, it has cooked for so long and you are so hungry that it’s the greatest goddamn thing you’ve ever eaten in your life. This is best served with nothing, you don’t need 3 or 4 goddamn things in every meal. The empire is dying, lol, start controlling your desire for a smorgasbord at every moment. But if you absolutely have to have something with it, I’d suggest making a little round cast iron frying pan of cornbread. I think there’s still old buttermilk in the fridge, and technically buttermilk that you’d use for cornbread never goes bad, like for years you can still use it. But I don’t personally feel like making cornbread, and you’re not here to make it (I feel your judgment), so I’m just having a couple flat bowls of collard greens, while I listen to Motley Crue’s Too Fast For Love, with the pitch shifter on the turntable slowed all the way down. (I will leave the concept of “Too Slow For Love” unmentioned – inside these parenthesis don’t count – so that you can have that idea. I hope you do something with it, I really do.) Oh yeah, don’t put your hoodie back on ‘til you’re done eating greens, but you can put the long johns Polo thing back on. It’s cold in here, and white clothes should know better than to be around you.
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