Mustard greens

In my CSA box from Featherstone Farms today, there were four kinds of tomatoes (little yellow ones shaped like pears, orange sweeties, a greenish-red heirloom, and several roma style cooking tomatoes), summer squash, bell peppers, basil, red onions, green beans, salad greens, cucumbers, and a bunch of mustard greens. I love my CSA deliveries! Opening the box is like opening a gift every week.
I often crave greens, any and all of them, especially bitter greens. I washed and ripped the leaves off the coarse stems, and cooked them down in the water left over from steaming the beans. I ate some with my salad, and put the rest in a container for later. There was almost a cup of broth left over, and I'm drinking it now. I like the flavor, and mustard greens have a huge amount of vitamins A and C, as well as other nutrients.
Nutrition has always fascinated me, and I just discovered asite called Nutrition Data, a good source of basic information presesented in the familiar USDA label format. An even better site is World's Healthiest Foods because it gives detailed explanations of the health benefits associated with the nutrients in specific foods. The entry on mustard greens explains why mustard greens might be particularly good for the lungs, the liver, and the joints, but not so great for people who have kidney or gall-bladder problems (because of the presence of oxalates). It reminds me of the kind of information that fascinated me when I started using Laurel's Kitchen to cook with, many years ago. The New Laurel's Kitchen is practically a textbook of nutrition as well as a cookbook.

Here is their list of the "worlds healthiest foods," (129) of them, according to these criteria: nutrient dense, whole foods, that are familiar, available, affordable and taste good.