Add these 5 garden greens for vegetable variety

Leafy green vegetables meant for cooking rather than salad making (although there is some overlap) are a large and diverse group. Try adding these five varieties to shake up your soups and side dishes.

• Like fresh spinach leaves, beet greens are tender and cook quickly
• They have a mild flavour
• Cook greens in a covered frying pan using just the water that clings to the rinsed leaves
• Add butter or olive oil
• Other ingredients to add to give the greens more flavour include crushed garlic, ground cumin or a good dash of Tabasco

• Kale comes in several varieties with leaves that are very crinkly, serrated or feathery and tones of blue-green, reddish purple, grey-green or light green
• All but the season's first tender kale leaves tend to be quite tough – they need braising for 12 to 15 minutes
• Kale has a full flavour and is especially good chopped and added to hearty winter soups near the end of cooking

• These light green, crinkly leaves pack a hot punch, especially if simmered for no more than 15 minutes. Longer cooking mellows the flavour
• They are an excellent complement to Asian pork dishes that have a rich sauce
• Grated ginger, soy sauce and toasted sesame seeds are all good matches for mustard greens
• Pickled mustard greens are also available
• The flavour of peppery mustard greens may be too strong for some palates. If you find them too pungent or bitter, quickly blanch the leaves in salted water to reduce their sharpness
• Mustard greens are also known as curled mustard, mustard spinach, Indian mustard or leaf mustard

• Swiss chard is sometimes confused with spinach, with which it is interchangeable. However, Swiss chard has an earthier taste
• The leaves can be blanched, sautéed, steamed or stir-fried
• The wide stem, or rib, which comes in vivid red, yellow or a bright white, can be chopped and sautéed in oil or butter
• The stems take a little longer to cook than the leaves

• The best-known of all the cooking greens, spinach comes with dark green, crisp crinkly leaves
• English spinach, which has a shorter season, has paler green flat leaves
• Trimmed spinach leaves can be cooked in a pan with just the water left clinging to the leaves from rinsing. Cover and steam for one or two minutes. Do not overcook
• Popeye didn't get his strength from spinach because it is not, in fact, a great source of iron. While it is true that it does contain good quantities of iron, it also contains oxalic acid, which limits how much iron the body can absorb

Adding more variety to your diet in the form of green leafy vegetables is a great way to eat healthier and experience new flavours.

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