Adventures In Palatable Kale
As an Amazon associate, I may earn a small commission if you navigate to Amazon from my site and buy something. This will not result in an extra cost to you.
I’m a big fan of the Smitten Kitchen blog. I have been following her almost as long as she has been posting. Fabulous recipes, easy to make, with some entertaining commentary along the way. She’s also written several cookbooks, one of which features in today’s blog post. It’s the Smitten Kitchen Every Day cookbook, and in it is a recipe that I make frequently. Since this cookbook (and therefore the recipe in it) is available for purchase, I don’t feel quite right about posting my version in a downloadable format, as I feel like that’s perilously close to taking money away from the author. With that in mind, I will just present it as a method, with no attached recipe.
Kale. It’s really good for you but it smells like sweaty socks and doesn’t taste that great either. So, how to make it palatable? Well, I do have a kale salad recipe that is utterly delicious and which everyone in my family likes. But for this blog post, I want to talk about one of my favorite meals, which is a kale/sausage/crouton sauté. This is most easily made when everything is set up and ready to go before you start. Mis en place!
Toast two pieces of bread. Cut the hard center rib out of 3-5 big kale leaves…any variety will do. Do not make the mistake of buying a tub of that tender baby kale…that stuff is too soft and fragile for this dish. Once you’ve cut the ribs out, slice the kale leaves into thin ribbons. Get out a jar of minced garlic (or you could grate/mince one garlic clove) and take a heaping spoonful out, squeezing out the juice as best you can, and set it aside. Open a 15-oz can of white beans, and drain and rinse them and set aside. Get out your seldom-used bottle of red wine vinegar and also some parmesan cheese and set them aside. The bread should be toasted by this time, so stack it up on your cutting board and cut it into cubes (which we are going to call croutons).
As far as the actual cooking goes, you’ll want to brown your sausage first. You can use any sausage you like, of course, but I really like the flavor profile of this mild Italian sausage. At my grocery store, it comes in these links. Some days I use two links (about 5 oz sausage) and some days I only use one. But either way, the sausage needs to be removed from its casing, which is quite easy. Just grab a sausage link in the middle and squeeze toward the end. Then do the same toward the other end, et voila! Sausage sans casing. Over medium heat, cook the sausage in a tablespoons or so of olive oil, breaking it apart with a wooden spoon, until most of the pink is gone. Then add in your minced garlic and cook a couple more minutes.
Once the sausage is brown, add in your bread cubes croutons and let them fry for 2-3 minutes. Then toss in your kale ribbons. As soon as the kale is in, add a little salt and pepper and then stir until the kale just starts to wilt and turn bright green (or very dark purple, if you use purple kale).
Add in about 1/3 of the can of white beans and stir until the beans are heated through, another 1-2 minutes. Once the beans are warmed up, turn off the heat, make a little space in the middle of your pan, and add about a tablespoon of your red wine vinegar. Scrape the vinegar over the bottom of the pan to deglaze any burnt (tasty) bits, and then dump the entire pan’s worth of goodies into a bowl. Top with however much parmesan cheese you like, mix it up, and enjoy.
For me, this is a hearty meal. Since I usually only eat two meals a day, I tend to like bigger meals when I do eat. If someone wanted more stingy moderate portions, this could serve two people. While this dish is high in calories, it’s also high in nutrients, so I’m calling it a healthy dinner.
