Random foodie post with recipe

For a vegan dinner guest:

1. Whole wheat couscous with Spanish saffron (the latter left over from trip to Istanbul a year ago).

2. On top of the couscous, a newly invented concoction occasioned by a large bag of fresh mustard greens from last week's farmers' market:

Put some olive oil in a fairly large cooking pot.
Chop an onion and start sauteeing. Heat not too high, you don't want the onion to brown.
After rinsing the mustard greens to make sure there is no grit left, cut them pretty fine (fold each leaf and then cut strips one centimeter wide) and dump them into the pot, stirring and adding a bit of oil as needed; the mustard greens will start shrinking.
Add a dash of salt.
Add some raisins.
Keep stirring.
Add some more mustard greens because the original ones have shrunk some more and you still want the mustard greens to be the dominant ingredient.
Stir, stir.
The pot will be far from full. The large pot is less about needing large capacity and more about the broad cooking surface.
Take half a local apple, yellow and a little tart (it's what I had around, also from the farmers' market), not one of those newfangled sweetiefuji ones, and slice it and stir in.
When you take the pot off the stove, the mustard greens will be cooked and dark green, the raisins will be plump, the onions will be translucent, and the apple pieces will still be crisp.

That's it. The tastes marry well and the raisins' sweetness offsets the sharp spiciness of the fresh mustard greens. The dish will look pretty on top of the couscous.

The vegan guest and I both thought it was good. "I just invented it," said I. "Write it down," said she.

The cat walked around trying to sniff the plates; we kept explaining that it wasn't cat food and shooing her away. She'd already had homemade chicken broth as a treat. She is not a vegan.

This post is dedicated to Ralph (a.k.a. TCR) and JohnieB.