“If Bugs Come Out Of Your Vegetables When You Wash Them, All The Better”
This passionate about cooking with vegetables shares in her books the tricks of a lifetime cooking with love and enjoying what the earth provides.
Karin Leiz, daughter of Germans, was born in Seville. As a child, I already tasted the taste of flowers and plants to find out what made them different. Later, when she started cooking, she made an effort to respect and enhance each vegetable. When he was 70 years old, he began to publish his recipe books, in which vegetables are the protagonists.
She is the author of books such as 1,460 recipe to enjoy vegetables all year round , Vegetables in many ways or Cooking with herbs , among other titles.
Apart from developing her culinary passion, she has worked as a scriptwriter and art director in the advertising studio she founded with her husband, Leopoldo Pomés.
– Why are you so passionate about vegetables?
“I notice that they feel good to my body.” And then there are the subtleties of its taste. That is why I like so much the recipes in which spices intervene that underline that flavor. Swiss chard, for example, tastes delicious if treated well.
– How is chard “treated well”?
-First they wash very well. If bugs come out, the better, because it means that they have grown on the ground and not in a greenhouse. They drain well. And the bottom line is cooking: you can spoil the best vegetables if you let them boil too much. Nobody would do it with pasta, well with vegetables either!
– How long do chard have to boil to be just right?
–It depends on the size, the thickness of the blade… that is learned with practice. Ideally, first boil the leaves and after 4-5 minutes add the leaves, to let them boil for 3 to 5 more minutes. Anyway, steaming would be even better.
Either way, letting the vegetables cook while other things are done is the big mistake.
The other is not to take advantage of the cooking water, in which half of the nutrients have remained.
How did you get your children to like vegetables?
– He was very pactista. There was one who only wanted peas. So I would prepare peas with rice, peas with potatoes, pea omelettes… I would make them whatever vegetables they wanted so that they would never reject it. And little by little they opened up to other vegetables. I think that if vegetables are eaten at home, the children end up integrating it.
“Where do you buy that vegetable?”
– If I can, in a market. I really enjoy buying vegetables from the peasant women of Empordà, where I usually go on weekends. I do not pursue the ecological, I believe that buying like this already is. I do choose seasonal fruit and vegetables.
–What plants do you recommend growing at home if you have little space?
-The rosemary must be forgotten, because it is difficult to maintain. But you can grow parsley. Sage and mint grow like nothing.
