Kale will make you Hale

Hello Diggers. Isn’t our garden lovely?

This is our kale patch. In case you’re a bit shy of it, let me tell you what I do with kale.

Step 1 is to snap off a dozen or so leaves. You don’t want the baby ones at the top, but the middle-ish ones that are fresh looking.

I took a dozen leaves plus a little red pepper and I doubt you could tell I was there.

There are two kinds of kale in our patch. One is a curly-leaf variety that is prized for it’s tastiness. The other kind is an ornamental variety.

The purple flowering variety is entirely edible (all kale varieties are) but prized for it’s showy colours, not for it’s flavor. I didn’t notice a big difference in taste this early in the season.

Take some home, wash it, and remove the spines. Toss them in your compost bucket. You want the leafy bits.

Kale freezes amazingly well so I like to stock up for the winter months. Kale is one crop that gets a bit sweeter with freezing and it holds it’s structure marvelously (more like cabbage then spinach) in soups, stews, sauces, chili, etc. so it’s wonderful to have a freezer full. In the winter when you’re cooking savoury dishes, add a few leaves of frozen kale. I don’t bother chopping them before freezing, I just crumple them into the pot. But do remove the spines. Kale adds so much green nutrition to winter foods.

I froze about half of the leaves I picked. I made a simple stir-fry side-dish out of the rest. My friend Audrey, a nutritionist and a rare beauty taught us this technique for cooking up any greens (bok choy, spinach, gai lan, what have you.) It works great for kale.

You need these ingredients:

Garlic (optional)
Onions
Kale (or any green)
Canola Oil (or Olive, or sesame & olive oil, whatever you like/have)
Black Bean Sauce (or Oyster sauce, or Teriyaki, or any stir-fry sauce you like/have)

The brand isn’t important.

Chop up your kale leaves about like so…

Sizzle the onions and garlic in a wok or frying pan. You need lots of room for greens in your pan, so you need a pan with enough volume.

I like them brownish…

Add the kale and toss it around.

Fry it until the greens are wilted, but still bright.

Add a wee slorp of black bean sauce. I used about about a tablespoon for six leaves of kale. It’s very salty, so don’t add too much. Use a little, taste it, then add more if needed.

Fast. Easy. So nutritious. Kale yum yums.

According to Organic Authority, Kale is the New Beef.

Drop by the Parkallen Community Garden anytime and help yourself to the kale.