the arugula files

Last Chance Kale

When Josie was a baby, she ate a lot of kale.  Most of the time she ate it with cheese-y grits.  Perfect food for feeding a 9 month old: soft, green, delicious.  No worries about choking, but still real food.  

Then one day she said, no thank you and stopped eating kale. I kept putting it on her plate, but she would just work around it.  Not long after, she proclaimed it yucky.  Sigh.

This dish is my last chance kale.  I thought, kids like little pies so why not give it a try?  And, guess what, she ate it.  She actually picked off the sides of the phyllo crust and just ate the green parts.  For real.  So much for my little pie theory.

Last chance kale.  

Get it while you can.

 

Kale and Honey Crisp Apple Salad with Toasted Almonds

It's that time between Thanksgiving and Christmas when I'm starting to freak out my eating "situation." Everywhere I turn there is something delicious: brownies, chocolate bark, and banana bread.  I know this sounds a little grinch-y, but I try to say NO.  You will see me in my office hallway, walking by the brownies that someone placed on the lunch table to share, muttering to myself, no means NO. Sometimes no really does mean no and sometimes it means, hey, it's the holidays, I'll just take a small bite (which inevitably turns into twenty bites).  

In between recent meals of meatballs, pigs in a blanket, short ribs, polenta, and tikka masala, I made this kale salad for lunch.  It made me feel virtuous and restored my balance.  It came together easily.  I started by cutting the "ribs" out of curly kale leaves and roughly chopped them. I toasted some almonds, sliced some honeycrisp apples, and then added this dresssing.  

Not quite ready to give up the cookie exchange?  Don't let me ruin your holiday because I'm certainly doing my share of indulging. Tuck this one away for 2014 when we all hit the gym and start eating kale for 3 weeks.

 

Sesame-Kale Chips

If you are a child of the 80s, like me, then you probably remember Shrinky Dinks, the large flexible plastic sheets that featured characters like Smurfs or Hello Kitty.  After you colored the sheets with markers, you placed them in the oven, and they shrunk to small hard decorative pieces without altering the picture.  They were magical. 

Turns out CSA members (or really anyone with too many vegetables hanging around in their crisper) can use the Shrinky Dink Method to use up that kale. The method is quite simple, you "color" your kale with your favorite spice, add oil, and put it in the oven. Watch that intimidating amount of kale shrink into something delicious. Cooks call this method roasting. I call it a sure way to use all my CSA veggies.  I roast everything these days.  Chop, oil, salt, put in oven.  Beets, potatoes, onions, radishes, whatever.  

As a side note, I'm a recent kale chip convert.  My first attempt at kale chips left me feeling underwhelmed. I recently discovered that kale chips are best when you use curly kale.  

 

Sweet Potato and Lemon Drenched Kale Tacos

A winter CSA means I have more sweet potatoes and greens than I know what to do with.  The easy solution is to roast the tubers and saute the greens and then put them in (or on) something, like this taco, for example.

I'm not sure what makes a taco a taco.  As I see it, if food is placed in some type of tortilla (flour, corn, wheat) then it's  a taco (especially if it's sprinkled with cheese).  I like to describe this dish as a taco rather than the alternative description, wrap, because a wrap sounds like bland health food and taco sounds tasty. This dish is both healthy and tasty so maybe I should call it something else entirely.  Wraco?  Oh dear. I think I'll stick with taco.