Shrinking Food

We all know all types of fresh produce and meat shrink when cooked but some shrink so much that, it is annoying.

In Turkey, we cook purslane just like we cook spinach,chard and leeks. We sautee onions and tomatoes and add the well washed and cut of purslane and cook it. Couple of days ago I bought three large bunches of purslane hoping that it would make 4 portions. It took at least a good half hour and a ton of water to wash it. It was so much that, for a while we thought, it would not fit in the pressure cooker, then it SHRUNK! We ended up with 3 portions of a veggie dish:( Spinach and chard are like that too.

I had also bought three large bell eggplants and they also shrunk to a 3 portion meal.

According to our meal plan we must have a veggie dish for one meal and a meat dish for another. The veggie dish portion is 8 tablespoons so, you can figure out how much the purslane shrunk.

Before I wrote this, I looked up purslane from the dictionary because I did not know the English word for it and found out that in the US, it is considered a weed and not eaten. That is an interesting fact. I like the salty and tangy taste of purslane. We not only cook it, we also chop it and mix it with garlic yogurt for a meze or a salad. Sometimes we also chop it in other salads as well.

It is annoying to spend a lot of time preparing and washing loads of vegetable only to end up with a few portions.