Friday, October 27, 2006
Kale
Now that our faith in spinach has been shaken, let me say a few words about kale. What an amazing and delicious green vegetable and so inexpensive too! It's not as fragile and perishable as spinach. It's a hearty robust green. It's loaded with important vitamins, B6, calcium, iron, vitamin A. If you steam it in a pressure cooker it takes three minutes. Then I like to douse it with olive oil and kosher salt or soy sauce and enjoy it with gusto! Popeye never had it so good. Save the green kale water from steaming, it has vitamins too. You can drink it salted as a hot broth or use as a base for soup or as the water used in baking bread. I've often thought if I were really in a fix I could "liberate" the purple and green kale bouquets planted as decoration around office parks.
It happens that just today I posted my kale and white bean and linguica soup recipe over at the tool crib, after a ridiculously long hiatus.
ReplyDeleteKale is on our minds, I guess. I never knew the beautiful purple stuff was kale.... I always thought it was some kind of cabbage. Who knew?
Hi Em, I'm sitting here on a misty, rainy day, reading all your posts at once! Re: spinach, it has something (oxalic acid?) that makes a coating on your teeth - I don't like the feel. It's the same with beet greens and chard. It also interferes with the absorbtion of calcium, it binds with it. Whereas kale, and collards, too, are free of that compound, so I like them better and the calcium is more available. I like the Red Russian kale the best, and I don't like the purple kale, it's tougher. I think organic kale is more tender than from the supermarket. The best kale has been outside and got a frost, that makes it sweet and tender. When I lived on the farm we grew enough kale to last the winter. I would go out in my boots, brush off the snow and break off the stem of a huge plant and bring it in frozen. After it thawed, it only took a few minutes to steam. I always steam my kale. I like it with salad dressing and pine nuts sprinkled on top. I put it in sandwiches and burritos and soups. Collards are just as good. I cut out the stem and make a neat pile of the leaves, then I slice them into thin strips - noodle greens! I always wondered, with so many baby-sized vegetables these days, why they don't harvest baby collards. Then, just the other week, I found some. I bought two bunches. They were delicious! I put half of the batch in the freezer for later. One last thing, if you can get it from soneone's garden, broccoli leaves are my favorite green, but no one harvests and sells them. they are so yummy and very tender. I also like rutabaga leaves.
ReplyDeletelove you, Sue