Kale - How Do You Cook That?

Organic Basket Delivery Week 3

Kale - a huge bunch of kale was in the last organic box delivery and frankly I had no idea what to do with it. Kale and Holland are always connected in my memory. A Saturday morning trip to the nearby market in Den Haag always yielded fresh bread, a fresh pot of vegetable soup that contained kale, meat balls and various other vegetables, along with a fresh chunk of Gouda cheese on the table. One friend creates a beautiful kale pie made with cottage cheese, cheddar cheese, eggs and kale and it always tastes fabulous but I don’t know how to make it. The Irish Chef I work with has memories of kale chopped and steamed and then mixed with bacon, onions and mashed potatoes.

Kale is one of the best greens you can eat as it is one of the best sources of beta-carotene, and for a green vegetable it is unusually high in fibre. There are a variety of vitamins, especially vitamin A and calcium. Kale also can trigger the liver to produce the all important enzymes that detoxify cancer causing chemicals which we are all daily exposed to - a powerful antioxidant. So that means it is good for you and if we are trying to eat foods that bring us life, this would be a good one. Just how to prepare so we can enjoy it is then the next question.

The internet holds a fabulous library of recipes and makes it so easy to find out how to cook new foods, or find new ideas for giving old favourites a new flavour. Today it was the place to find out how to cook this batch of kale that had arrived in my last organic vegetable and fruit basket delivery.

Roasted Kale with Red Onions, a Better Homes and Gardens recipe, caught my eye. As I began to prepare it I decided to add a couple of other ingredients that seemed like they would fit. I am afraid that sticking to a recipe is like trying to colour within the lines with a child and their colouring book - I just can’t seem to do it very well! The basic recipe suggests caramelizing red onion, adding it to the chopped kale, tossing it together with a little olive oil and throwing it into a medium hot oven for 15 minutes. The variation recipe for kale -
Roasted Kale with Caramelized Onion and Apples

1 bunch of kale - chopped
½ large onion, thinly sliced
2 tablespoons brown sugar
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon butter
Salt and pepper to flavour
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
1 crisp apple, thinly sliced but not skinned
1 teaspoon of oregano

- Heat oven to 375F
- line a 9 x 13 pan with tin foil
- heat olive oil and when it is hot add sliced onion and cook for 5 minutes
- add brown sugar, stir constantly, and cook for a few more minutes
- add the balsamic vinegar and the oregano and continue to cook for 5 more minutes so that the sugar and balsamic have created a syrup for the onions.
- add the caramelized onions to the chopped kale and season with salt and pepper
- melt the butter in the pan you had the onions in and add it to the kale. Toss everything together so it is well coated.
- add the sliced apple
- place the kale in the oven and bake it for 20 - 25 minutes.

It will have a slightly crispy texture and the slightly bitter kale with the caramelized onions and sweet tender apples is a lovely burst of textures, sweet, salty and bitter all rolled into one bite. Caramelized onion always adds a burst of flavour to whatever you combine it with and the balsamic especially adds a stronger aroma to the onions. Apples, surprisingly, also add a delightful sweetness when they are cooked together with other ingredients. They do not have the tang of citrus but rather a more gentle infusion of their character that adds a lovely subtle change to any dish.

Next time the kale arrives in our organic basket we will search for another way to enjoy this very nutritious bunch of greens.

New Organic Delivery - What's For Dinner?

The new surprise box of organics had arrived! Time to check out what we can do with the contents of this weeks delivery. The fresh fruit is great for breakfast and snacking on, the kale is something I have not cooked with so I look forward to trying new recipes with that and the rest of the basket will provide some basic vegetables for our new week of meals.

In the last basket there was a lovely chunk of ginger which has provided daily cups of ginger lemon tea. There were a few things left to use up quickly before starting the new produce so this dinner is a combination of what was left and some beet tops from the new box.

What I want to use this time: carrots, onion, garlic, potatoes, yams, apples, beets and beet tops, pork tenderloin. There was not a lot of time in this busy day so everything needed to be prepared and ready within 1 hour.

Roasted Vegetables - ready in 40 minutes
Roasted vegetables are always tasty and easy. Some chopped carrots, onion and yams, along with a couple of new little red skin potatoes are sprinkled with a little oil, some salt and pepper to taste along with some oregano. Whole garlic cloves in their skins are nice to add to these veggies and when they are ready the soft garlic comes out of the skin very easily and has a caramelized taste to it. In the oven at 425F they can roast and be ready in 40 minutes.

Steamed Beet Tops - ready in 15 minutes
Beet tops are often thrown away and only the beet root used. The green leafy tops are even more rich in iron than spinach, as well as being loaded with vitamins A, B1, B2, B6, C and vitamin K. The beet root can wait but just taking the beet tops and steaming them for about 15 minutes they are a tasty rich green vegetable. A touch of butter and some seasoning makes them a very easy addition to dinner. The only caution on these is that beet tops are one of the things that anyone on blood thinners should eat very little of (Vitamin K rich greens react with medications such as Coumadin)

We had purchased a package of pork tenderloins a few weeks ago and they were frozen individually. My husband makes some beautiful dishes with pork tenderloin. But these recipes all involve various kinds of marinade that requires more time than we had today. So it had to be a dish that would be prepared, cooked and ready to serve within the 60 minutes we had available.

Herb Crusted Pork Tenderloin - ready in 45 minutes
After trimming of the skin and fat and cutting the tenderloin in half, it was seasoned with salt and pepper and then seared it to a light brown colour in the waiting hot fry pan with a little oil and butter. Take any of the oil from the pan after it is seared and keep it aside for the herb crust. Put the tenderloin, in the fry pan, into the oven for 20 minutes.

It is a bit early in the season for my herbs in the garden to be really luscious but there is still enough out there to use once in a while. I gathered some fresh thyme, rosemary, a couple of sage leaves and some chives and chopped them finely. Pounding them together with the mortar and pestle it is nice to also add a little fresh lemon zest before adding the oil removed from the fry pan. A little bit of bread crumbs were added to bind it all together. After the pork had cooked for 20 minutes, it was brushed with Dijon mustard and then the herb mixture packed on top of the tenderloin. Slice up an apple into nice thin slices and put them around the pork. Throw the pork and apples back into the oven for about another 10 minutes.

Dinner prepared from our organic delivery with some meat added, herbs from the garden, and nice glass of Malbec wine was tasty and it felt good to sit down at the table and take time to enjoy this meal before heading off to evening appointments.