"Your body was meant to run on good food:
fruits, vegetables, lean protein, and lots of water.
Eat good food!"
-- Tom Giaquinto, Be A Good Human
 |
| Kale chips 4-3-14 |
"I believe in a benevolent God not because He created the Grand Canyon or Michelangelo,
but because he gave us snacks."
-- Paul Rudnick,
I Shudder and Other Reactions to Life, Death, and New Jersey
Nobody has to tell me to eat my veggies.
Always do. Always have.
I like 'em all, pretty much. When we were kids and my sisters were stuck at the table gagging on Brussels sprouts gone cold, my plate was picked clean and I was long gone.
In fact, I eat so many vegetables that my challenge is finding new and different ways to prepare them, just to keep them interesting so I don't get bored.
Kale isn't really all that interesting. It's green, leathery, cabbage-y, sea-weedy. You can put it in soups. You can toss it into a stir-fry. To me it's one of those veggies you sneak into a recipe, you hide it with other stuff and hope nobody notices. Kale is not a front and center Beyonce type of vegetable. Kale is more like the fifth doo-wop girl in an aging R&B band. If the other voices are strong enough, they can usually drown her out.
You can juice kale, but juice is one place where kale is way too overpowering. Cabbage flavored juice smells bad and looks gross -- like it might turn me into Elpheba from Wicked.
While I can appreciate kale's myriad health benefits, I really can't say I love it.
Until now.
Now I think I might be hooked on it.
Yesterday I snipped a fat bunch of kale into small pieces, tossed them with a little olive oil, sprinkled them with kosher salt, then baked them into delicate, crispy little kale chips. They were delightful. Airily crunchy. Perfectly salty. Highly addictive.
I baked two half sheet trays full of them, and I ate every single chip. I was a kale-crunching machine, in such a frenzy I couldn't stop myself. It felt every bit as decadent and pleasurable as a forbidden potato chip binge but with none of the guilt. I kept thinking "I should stop." And then I'd think, "It's kale, for Chrissakes. It's good for you. Eat the fuck up!"
Kale, I'm sorry. I apologize for misjudging you for all of these years.
It wasn't you. It was me.
I never knew.
I'm ready to try again.
I think we might have a good thing going.
