Correct except that amaranth doesn't need as much water as corn & doesn't need the fertilizer that corn needs. Corn is considered a heavy feeder where amaranth, like a weed doesn't have to be pampered. But yes, if one can grow corn they can most assuredly grow amaranth.
If you plant them in a garden plot, I suggest broadcasting the seed as opposed to planting the seed spaced out in nice, neat rows. Not only is that easier than dealing with the tiny seed but will give you the opportunity to thin out many smaller plants and eat them like spinach. Plus if you note in pictures, they can handle a high plant density. Thus you can continue to thin even larger plants to harvest the bigger leaves.
That last picture of the soup looks amazing! I could handle small leaves of kale mixed with a salad, just didn’t like it by itself. Mixing some into a soup sounds like a great idea. One of my diet goals is lower cholesterol, so ham and sausage with lots of salt is kind of a no no now. That was the best part of eating greens for me....For folks not used to growing & cooking greens, maybe a short lesson here. Here is a collard plant. I love collards because they are so easy to grow & one plant produces so many large leaves. You pick the lower, large leaves & small new leaves keep growing from the top. Being large leaves, they are exceptionally easy to clean & process... as opposed to say turnip greens. What I show below will work with amaranth leaves just as well.
Note here the large leaves have been picked. In a week or so, these plants will be ready to pick again.
For reference, here is Lacinato kale. I treat it interchangeably with collards. Grows similarly but the leaves are slimmer & longer. Collards can handle warm weather better than kale.
Processing the collard leaves. After washing the leaves & removing the center stem, I roll a stack of leaves like a cigar and then slice in strips of about 1/2". If you want small pieces, just chop again. I generally just do the single cut. With an average leaf being 8' - 10' wide, with the center stem removed, the cut pieces end up being around 4" long. Since the greens shrink some during cooking, this works fine for me. At this point, they are ready to go in the pot.
Here is a pot of collard, white bean & Italian sausage soup. Now when I just cook the greens as a side dish, I start with some chopped onion & peppers, sauteed in a bit of oil. I then add chicken stock, smoked ham hocks and/or bacon and the leaves. Not unusual to added some red pepper flakes, a bit of sugar and some vinegar. Once it comes to a boil, reduce the heat & simmer for at least 2 hours.
The collard/kale gumbo I made a few days ago used turkey smoked sausage. Made a dark roux using olive oil, sweated down the trinity, then added low sodium chicken broth, the turkey sausage and the greens. Very healthy and very tasty. If you make your own chicken broth, you can control the sodium even more.
Cooking your own food is almost the only way to eat healthy now days. When you read what’s in most fast food and commercial restaurants you realize that healthy wasn’t in mind when they came up with their recipes. I like to cook anyways most of the time. Yesterday I was on the road for 12 hours though. Ended up eating at Sonics for lunch. Tasty, but enough sodium and cholesterol to choke a horse!
When I grew up in the 50s & 60s, we had no kids in any of our classes with attention deficit disorder, or any of these conditions that plague the children of today. My wife is a teacher and every classroom has kids with all sorts of disorders... multiple kids. So what happened? I believe, and research is starting to show, that it due to all the processed & fast food eaten today. When I grew up, the only processed food was frozen TV dinners and we never ate any of those horrible things. We had no fast food in our town & for us to get a burger meant driving almost an hour into Memphis. So we cooked all our food and if we wanted fast food, we took out gumbo or red beans from the freezers.Cooking your own food is almost the only way to eat healthy now days. When you read what’s in most fast food and commercial restaurants you realize that healthy wasn’t in mind when they came up with their recipes. I like to cook anyways most of the time. Yesterday I was on the road for 12 hours though. Ended up eating at Sonics for lunch. Tasty, but enough sodium and cholesterol to choke a horse!
