Rethinking Trash: Greens stems in bacon grease

A friend and I were having a conversation the other day, the gist of which was this:

If our collective grandmas and great-grandmas could look into our kitchens and see the stuff we throw away and the stuff we buy, they would roll around in their graves, or at the very least be really, really confused.

We (you know it's not just me) throw away meat bones and vegetable tops and then turn around and buy stock and broth from a box? Toss bacon grease in the trash and then buy some kind of aerosol grease in a spray can to grease a pan? And then what - buy an anti-pollution t-shirt? Yeah, we deserve to be mocked...

So, "Liberated from the Trash" experiment number 1 - the stems left over after cooking mustard, collard and turnip greens plus bacon grease...

I had already used the leaves and some of the stems for my greens (which turned out horribly, by the way - somehow dirty and gritty - eeewww...the whole thing had to sadly be tossed - obviously something I hate, as I am currently telling you, in this post, right this moment, to eat your trash - I digress...), but I usually don't like to use the stems too much, because I find them too...stemmy.

I kept them long and sauteed them with a minced garlic clove in some leftover bacon grease. They smelled fragrant and rich, like a sum of all of the pieces. They looked kind of like asparagus.

I tried to eat them first after only a very light saute - fail. Way too fibrous to actually chew and eat. So, basically, you have to cook the hell out of them. Really fry them until they wither and shrivel and kind of end up looking like crispy sauteed scallions - for like an hour or so over medium high heat. And then they taste tasty. But they were way too greasy and after a while, a bunch of them still ended up in the trash....

But the idea still lives on! Vive la trash!