recipes

 As of a few days ago, we still had some greens in the garden, particularly kale.  Recently, I -- a bit of a "gourmet" potato chip fiend -- learned of kale chips as a healthy way to satisfy our cravings for crispy, salty snacks!  There are many, many recipes to be found online, most calling for oven baking, with a few instead calling for a food dehydrator.  I experimented a bit with the oven methods, since many people don't have a dehydrator and, also, I figured that baking was likely to give more flavor.  

The first step is to cut the heavy stem out from the kale leaves.  While some recipes I found suggested using a sharp knife, it turns out that you can tear the kale away from the stem readily.   Tear the kale into pieces that will be "bite size" once they're dehydrated.  About a 3 to 4 inch dimension seems to work fine. 

I washed the kale pieces thoroughly in water, and dried them as well as possible.  I used a salad spinner and then blotted them with a towel. 

Then, I placed the kale pieces in a bowl, and added some extra virgin olive oil (at least I hope it was EVOO -- mine was from Trader Joes). I massaged the olive oil into the leaves, so that all were as evenly coated as possible.  Then, I seasoned them generously with sea salt and fresh ground black pepper.  The coated kale looks like this:

I then spread the kale in a single-thickness layer on a baking sheet.  Some of the videos stressed that the layer must be only one leaf thick, warning that if the kale is piled up, it won't become crispy.  (I chose not to test this theory, so have only tried the single layer.)  Before baking, it will look like the photo below, and will shrivel up considerably and darken in color, as described below, as it bakes. 

I baked the kale in an oven set for 350 degrees F.  Some of the recipes said that only 10 min was needed to get them fully dehydrated and crispy.  I tried the recipe in two ovens, and one took at least 15 min and the other took 20.  (Both ovens were set on convection, which automatically sets the temperature to 325 degrees.  This may have been the issue.)  It's a good idea to just watch them and make sure that they do not burn.  They should reach a fairly uniform dark green color, and appear curled up and considerably smaller than the original pieces. 

After they're fully crisped up as described above, the kale chips can be very gently blotted on paper towels to remove excess oil. 

These are incredibly delicious and crispy straight from the oven!  Whatever you do, do not store the uneaten chips in a sealed container. This makes them lose their crispiness.  If there are any leftover, I would suggest storing them in an open bowl.  The finished kale chips, with their dark green color, are shown in the third photo, below.  The moistness you see on the chips is residual olive oil.  These are definitely finger food, but you will want some napkins handy.  

While of course this is best with local, fresh-from-the-garden kale, if you crave this snack "off season", I found that a Trader Joe's bag of precut and washed kale works great.  One bag will fill two large baking trays.

By the way, this is by no means the "perfect recipe" for kale chips.  If anybody has variations to suggest based on their own kale chips experiences, please add them in the comments section.  I'm also curious about other seasonings, as well as other greens that might also be used to make chips.  

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Right now, the arugula is beautiful in the garden.  There is plenty of it, and it’s still tender, as well as spicy.  Last week, I used my arugula in a salad.  But, tonight, John used our share of  Saturday’s harvest in one of our favorite pasta recipes, “Pesto of Sundried Tomatoes with Arugula”.  The book Pasta Fresca by Viana La Place and Evan Kleiman features very simple, delicious pasta recipes and this is one great example, from their section on “Pasta with Raw Sauces”.  Note that, in the printed recipe, John changed the “3/4 cup” sundried tomatoes to “entire jar (8 oz)”.  We use sundried tomatoes from Trader Joe’s, though the cookbook authors urge readers to make their own.  I’ve not done that yet, though I understand that tomatoes can be readily oven-dried. 

As you can see, this dish is very colorful and, with the spicy arugula, sweet sundried tomatoes, dried hot pepper, and garlic, it has a lot of flavor!  It’s also vegetarian, as are many, though not all, of the Pasta Fresca recipes. 

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Today my colleagues at the Garden were kind enough to let me take home one of the two kabocha squash that we harvested.  I regret that I didn't photograph it, but my colleague Elisabeth provided this photo of another of our beautiful kabochas (surrounded by tomatillos).  Wikepedia informed me, with its usual degree of authority, that Kabocha squash is also called "Japanese pumpkin".  Indeed, as you see, it is very pumpkin-like.  We also harvested two sugar pumpkins from our "Three Sisters" plot today, and our kabocha looked like they could easily have been their unripe cousins.

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Elisabeth reminded me about an amazing soup that uses kabocha, along with tomatillos.  I recalled the recipe, too, the minute she mentioned it yet, inexplicably, it's been over 10 years since I last prepared it.  It's "Tomatillo and Squash Soup" from Anna Thomas' "The New Vegetarian Epicure".  It is probably the best soup I've ever made, or eaten.  How on earth have I lived without it, let alone forgotten about it, for all these years?! I'm quite sure that the last time I made it was in the late 90's.  Kabocha squash and tomatillos were relatively hard to come by back then.  As we reminisced in the Garden today, you had to search for tomatillos at "Bread and Checkbook", and they cost a lot, and even the 12 required by the recipe were not necessarily in stock when you needed them.  Kabocha squash, with its firm very deep orange flesh and unique flavor (and tough constitution...you'd better have a good knife!), was not particularly easy to find either.

In our Garden, a tomatillo shortage is NOT an issue.  Our two tomatillo plants are thriving, and we have more tomatillos than we know what to do with!  (Until today, I've just been skewering and grilling them...delicious, yes, but so is anything that's skewered and grilled, no?). 

So, arriving home with my tomatillos (about twice as many as specified in the recipe;  this is my standard practice...I double up on the components I love the most) and my kabocha (deceptively small in appearance, as it turns out..it weighed in at just about the 2 lbs suggested by the recipe), I dug out my copy of Anna Thomas' classic book and got to it. This soup is somewhat labor intensive, and heats up your kitchen, but it is so, so worth it!  I roasted the tomatillos, along with our own Garden tomatoes and about a dozen garlic cloves* until lightly charred in the oven, cooled them a bit, and then blasted them in the food processor.  Meanwhile, I simmered the peeled and diced squash to extreme tenderness in Trader Joe's organic vegetable broth, skipping the additional water the recipe suggests.  Once these components were all cooked, I left them sitting and ran out to buy onions.  (Unfortunately, onions from our Garden are not large enough; they're mainly bunching onions -- yummy in their own right, but not for this recipe).  I was able to find organic sweet onions at Trader Joes.  I then carmelized the onions, along with one mashed garlic clove and a bit of salt, in EVOO.  At this point, it was time to toast, according to the book, "2 dried red serrano or other hot peppers" on the stovetop, chop them, and add them to the soup.  Instead of dried peppers, I first selected two fresh hot red peppers from the Garden. But, when I charred them and processed them (in my mini-food prep Cuisinart), they, despite my having removed the seeds, gave off such strong hot pepper fumes that, honestly, I was afraid to put them in the soup -- in fact I could barely breathe without coughing (guys, what ARE those peppers we're growing??).  I love this soup so much and, while I appreciate hot peppers, they can so easily overwhelm.  So, I discarded most of the hot pepper into my compost pile (sorry!).  I then went to the cupboard and selected a half dried Guajillo pepper from Penzey's, which describes it as as "not hot but rich, smoky and complex".  If I'd planned enough in advance I would have soaked it a bit but, instead, I just ground it up in the mini-prep (along with a small bit of the juice and pulp from our Garden hot peppers).  This is what went into the soup, along with some of our Garden cilantro and sea salt.  That's all.  Heated it through and, yes, it was still, after all these years, wonderful!  Still is, in fact..we have enough for lunch tomorrow. Elisabeth, thank-you for reminding me about this soup that I used to love so much! It's extraordinary!

Along with our Tomatillo and Squash soup for dinner tonight, John and I had a little cole slaw that I made, also inspired by a suggestion of Elisabeth's. I prepared the cole slaw with a tiny little cabbage, the result of a Garden experiment (see Lisa's post "The Great Cabbage Experiment", 08/01/2011).  I sliced it and combined it with one of our yellow carrots (coarse grated), our bunching onions (sliced thin) and a dressing of:  mayonnaise (Trader Joe's organic), cider vinegar, sea salt, black pepper and celery salt.  After mixing it all together, I decided to also add a bit of minced pineapple to temper the vinegar taste a bit.  Came out pretty good, if I say so myself.  Elisabeth, thanks for suggesting the cole slaw and, also, especially, for suggesting the original experiment that led to these sweet baby "2nd gen" cabbages!

Well that was our dinner tonight, along with some fresh, still sweet corn from Busa's, our beloved neighborhood farm.  The ingredients were mostly from the Garden, with some help from Busa's and TJ's.  Oh, yeah, and the perfect wine to accompany this feast was something crispy and cold from Enzed.  We bought it from either:  Menotomy Beer and Wine, TJs in Cambridge or Busa's Liquor..we don't quite recall where we got this one, but it was just right tonight.

* Garlic cloves are not yet available from the Garden, but stay tuned!  Now that we have been granted permission to keep the garden open through the winter, we will be planting some.  In the meantime, I used organic garlic from Trader Joe's.

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