Meet My New Friend, Kale

Kale is  an ultra nutritious green not many people use in their cooking, or are even familiar with.  You can easily grow it yourself, or check out the produce section of your market near the endive and spinnach and you will more than likely find kale. The tender leaves are chopped for cooking and the thickest part of the stems go to compost.  I only came upon it when at the market last June, where a group of seedlings marked down at the grocery store, looking extremely thirsty, were almost ‘free’.  For some reason, these sad, no-one-picked-me plants, appealed to me. In a hurry as grocery shopping is not one of my favorite things, I grabbed a group of 6 plants in their ugly little plastic compartments, and checked out.  Later that day I popped them in my garden and they took off. Growing lush, with a murky, green, color they looked almost like broccoli minus the broccoli. A few weeks later we were visiting our daughter when she served this awesome dish, Quinoa & Kale, and I was hooked.  Especially once I realized I had this hopeless little cast off in my garden.  Once back home we ate Kale in ways I do not think kale was usually prepared.  Another aspect of my food philosophy, if you don’t know it can’t be done, experiment.  So our kale adventure began.  My husband lovingly refers to it as our ‘Kale Diet’. Four six weeks kale was on our plate at least once a day, rarely in a repeated form as I experimented. The funny end to this story is this year I looked for kale in the Spring and found none, zero, nada.  But sure enough, some late-season, orphaned kale did find the way to my garden once again.