My First Kale

This post isn't about my first time ever eating kale. I've had this highly nutritious green several times. But last night was my first time ever cooking it!

I have to admit, I've always been a little hesitant to work with kale. It seemed like a lot of work to clean it and chop off those tough stems, and it takes me long enough to prep something simple like romaine. (I'm really slow.) But then at Wegmans (yes, again with the Wegmans love) I saw this giant bag (at least it looked giant to me) of cleaned and cut kale greens, and decided this was as good a time as any to make my first kale recipe. (Cleaned and cut greens that stay crisp and are priced affordably - why is this such a difficult concept for grocery stores?)

I found a simple sauteed kale recipe online from Bobby Flay and used that as a guideline to making my first kale dish.

Ingredients

Since this was a really basic kale recipe, just spotlighting the kale, it was relatively inexpensive - under $3!

Kale ($2.49)

Garlic ($0.05)

Olive oil ($0.05)

Water ($0)

Salt ($0)

Pepper ($0)

Red wine vinegar ($0.05)

Process

Step 1:  Usually, the first step would be to prep all the ingredients, but thanks to Wegmans, all I had to do was chop up some garlic. Thankful for easy prep.

Step 2:  Heat the olive oil in a large sauce pan on medium high, add the garlic and cook until soft. [You aren't supposed to cook the garlic until it's colored but it colored almost immediately for me.]

Step 3:  Raise heat to high and add 1/2 cup of water (or vegetable stock, but we don't have any of that on hand) and kale. [The ingredients also said to toss to combine, but the pan was so full that I could barely complete that step.] Cover and cook for 5 minutes.

Step 4:  Remove the cover, continue to cook the kale until all liquid is evaporated. Season with salt and pepper to taste, and add red wine vinegar. [All the liquid was already evaporated by the time I took off the cover, but the kale was still a little tougher than I liked, so I added more water and let it cook for longer (uncovered) until I liked the texture.]

That giant bag of kale produced two bowls of sauteed kale.

Review

The kale was pretty good. The flavor of the leafy greens really came through, since there wasn't much added to it. The cleaned and cut bag didn't just include the leaves, but also some of the stems, which turned out fairly tender after cooking them. I think it could have used more garlic (I used more than the 2 cloves from the recipe, but it still didn't taste garlicky enough for me). But it was a good first kale recipe and I'm excited to try cooking more (and different recipes) with it. Hopefully I can find another cleaned and cut bag soon!