Eat Your (Dark Green, Leafy) Vegetables

Since becoming vegetarian/vegan I've been on an neverending journey of culinary discoveries. I'm now eating more interesting, healthy food than ever before. The fresh produce section of a supermarket seriously excites me & don't even get me started on what a farmer's market does to me. There are so many incredibly tasty foodstuffs around!

Obviously, there are veggies I like more than others, the ones that are my current staples are broccoli, green beans, rocket and, more recently, savoy cabbage (lovely crispy-curlyness). With very few exceptions, I seem to at least tolerate most veggies.

Until recently, one of those exceptions was kale. Just seeing it sitting on the shelf amongst the other dark leafy greens scared me. While pak choi is your gentle smilling chinese guy, kale is the godfather & spinach is its bitch. This paranoia of kale goes back a long way, right into my childhood. There's a German dish consisting of shredded kale, salty beef/pork and potatoes, all cooked forever in a stew (Gruenkohl & Pinkel) which was the nightmare of my childhood. The kale in it, cooked to death & unseasoned, smelled & tasted of freshly mown grass, so my main objective whenever it was on the menu was to get as many potatoes and meat as possible and try to avoid the kale.

I would've happily gone on avoiding any contact with kale, but it started cropping up in quite a few otherwise rather tasty sounding recipes. It's also insanely healthy. So, feeling adventurous & slightly reckless, I bought a bag of kale & then got scared again right away & hid it in my part of the fridge (as much as you can hide a giant ass bag of leaves). It sat there mocking me for another day until I plucked up the courage to do something about it. A bit of googling for appropriate recipes ensued & I emerged with what I thought was a rather inoffensive way of preparing it - Kale Chips.

And what can I say - it's absolutely delicious!!! The oven baked kale (sprinkled with 2 tbsp oil and 2 tsp of season-all & baked for 20 minutes at 200 degrees, in case you're wondering) actually tasted just like crispy seaweed, my all-time Chinese buffet favourite. I was absolutely thrilled & almost ate the whole batch (300g) in one go. I'll be making it again tonight, just to make sure the last time wasn't just a lucky coincidence...

Rather pleased with my results, I'm now contemplating tackling other veggies that I'm currently neglecting. I'm pretty sure that fennel & I are never going to be close friends as it just smells wrong, and I'm not a big fan of celery stalks due to their fibery ribs (although I love the smell of celeriac root, it's instant yummyness), but that can probably be fixed as well if I just find the right recipe. I might try my luck with beetroot next, it just looks so nice & the colour is simply amazing, but I'm not quite sure if I like the taste.

OMG, just think of all the possibilities!!