A Rant: Kale

A nutritionist  told me I do not eat enough dark green leafy vegetables.  I should eat a lot more. Especially kale. It has a bazillion vitamins good for anything that might ail me.

“Everyone loves kale nowadays,” she told me.  “It is incredibly popular. Recipes for kale can be found in magazines from Bon Apetit to Woman's Day. If you want to be healthy eat kale.”

That's great and I certainly want to be healthy. However there is one little problem. Kale tastes awful. I sort of hesitate to say this because I will be greeted by protests about how great it is. The pro kale contingent is getting harder and harder to ignore.

I sat at a lovely outdoor restaurant and watched a dear friend consume an entire kale salad. She said she loved it. The waitress and I exchanged a look only the kale opposition can understand. Was this smart woman deluded by the kale conspirators out there who try to get us all to eat healthfully at any price?

No caffeine, no liquor, no fat or all fat. No flour no sugar. Forget salt. In other words no anything with taste, so maybe if you go this route your taste buds get assimilated and out of sheer desperation start liking anything.

So I bought some kale and looked up some recipes for salad. The pictures were beautiful. “Massage with virgin olive oil, add Balsamic vinegar and grate some Parmigiano Reggiano over it,” I read.

I massaged for five minute. Nothing like an edible salad was emerging so I added salt. Five minutes more of the massage. It still tasted like weeds. Then another five minutes. My fingers were getting tired. I sprinkled it with some vinegar not balsamic, I was darned if I was going to rush out and buy new vinegar for a bunch of kale. I didn’t have Parmigiano either but isn’t Romano ok? Plus a little bit more of a massage to assuage my inner critic. I tasted it. Oh dear, it was terrible.

My daughter told me I had purchased the Wrong Kale for Salads. I needed kale from a Farmers Market.

My sister in law suggested I try Baby Kale.

At my local Farmers Market I discovered there were many kinds of kale; curly, Russian, Siberian, Tuscan, Lacinato or Dinosaur to the cognoscenti.

I didn’t see that Baby Kale though.

I’ve tried some of these. I steamed Tuscan, I sautéed Siberian. I’ve massaged all of them and I still say kale is awful. It tastes like rubberized spinach. Or the vegetable version of octopus. You can chew it forever and still have to choke it down.  

My mom cooked kale with a couple of links of kielbasa or a nice hunk of ham. Cooked not steamed and particularly not massaged in a salad. She cooked it for hours and while edible and even sort of good it still took more than a bit of chewing to get it down.

I'll be darned if I am going to massage any vegetable for 15 minutes.

I know this is offensive and I am being stubborn and irascible. But to me kale is mean ugly stuff.  

                                                                              

I will go back and Google more recipes in order to get all those nutrients. Or maybe I will just eat more spinach. Like Popeye told me to.

I really will.