Kale

I was never inclined to buy kale until recently when I learned it's a "super food" as in super healthy.  Before, I associated its name with kelp (seaweed) which I have absolutely no desire to eat.  Kale also seems relatively inexpensive, at least right now. 

Kale is in the cabbage family.  It can be bitter, sort of like strong raw broccoli mixed with strong raw cabbage.  So, blanching it is a good idea.  I wasn't 100% confident about blanching and haven't liked the extra step it takes to remove skins and such (which are usually pretty good for you anyway), but with a flavor issue, I thought it would be worth it. 

After I purchased a massive bunch, I looked up on the Internet to find out how to cook it. The site I found suggests cutting the leaves off the stems with a knife.  I guess the stems are tougher like broccoli stems.  I didn't use a knife and wasn't at all delicate about it and just ripped the leaves off the stems and put them in a strainer.  After washing the leaf pieces, put the kale in boiling water for two minutes.  Then spoon it out into a strainer, and put the kale in a bowl of ice water to quickly cool.  I just used very cold water and that worked perfectly. Then you put the blanched kale on a towel to dry a bit.  Repeat this until all the kale is blanched.  Apparently, the water could later be used as soup stock, but I haven't tried that yet.

I like eating the blanched kale pieces cold.  It's very reminiscent of lettuce.  Even though it looks like it might be rubbery, it isn't.  We put blanched kale on hamburgers once instead of lettuce.  It was fabulous.  You can cook kale with other foods or with a little olive oil, garlic, and red pepper.  You can also put the pieces in single layers on tinfoil or parchment and freeze them.  Then bag them up to be able to quickly cook up later.  I discovered that if you leave them in the bag and squeeze the bag the frozen pieces shatter just like frozen fresh herbs.  I've also heard you can bake kale in the oven and they are sort of like potatoe chips. Last time we ate kale, we ate up the unfrozen, blanched pieces so quickly that I decided not to freeze most of it this time.