Kale Chips? EEEK! Potato Chips? YEAAA!

Kale chips and potato chips
attended a party together and made some friends.

It's hard to believe that some people are contemptuous of vegetables. They shove steamed broccoli or cooked peas around as if maggots were on their plates, and relatively unknown greens such as arugula or bok choy send them into vigorous uploading of meat and mashed potatoes.

But there's one vegetable that tops them all in the vile-to-veggie-haters category and that is kale. The evil kale, that we all should know by now is about the best thing we can eat to stave off inflammation and to boost immune systems. But even PK, who is a veggie lover and ardent gardener, can turn squeamish about kale. Any hint of "strong taste" and he's outta there. But he has another reason for being kale-adverse.

"Do you remember what it did to your BREATH?!" he asked. Rudely, very rudely, when I announced my intention to make kale chips again.

The last time I made kale chips was a few weeks back when we needed a party appetizer. I'd avoided making them before because I thought they'd be too much trouble and kale was not yet growing in the cold frame. But I kept running across recipes exclaiming the ease and deliciousness of kale chips, not to mention their superior nutritional value, so I purchased organic curly kale and started with what seemed a huge amount of torn leaves arranged on two cookie sheets.

Raw kale tossed with olive oil and seasoned salt on a parchment-paper
 lined baking sheet.

About 12  minutes later after baking in a 375 degree oven.

But after baking, I ended up with only a small bowl of green crispy things. They tasted great, even PK agreed, but I wasn't comfortable contributing such a paltry amount at a party for 20 people. What to do? Add potato chips!

Not ANY chip, of course, but Tim's Jalapeno Potato Chips. God, I love them. They are my junk food of choice. Just because I'm big into healthy eating and vegetables and low carbness doesn't mean I'm perfect and can't treat myself to a potato chip now and then. (Like maybe a few every day.) So combining them with the ultra virtuous kale chips is a perfect exercise in yin and yang, good and evil, and party pooper and party savor. (get it?)

When making the first batch, I did a fair amount of of kale-chip tasting, just to make sure they were edible, which made my tongue green and, apparently, my breath fetid, although that could have been because I seasoned the kale with garlic salt. PK did not appreciate my breath, but despite his crinkled up nose, the combo was a hit at the party.

Those who endeavor to eat "healthy" loved the kale chips, and even the people who say screw it when it comes to vegetables, took the plunge by trying a kale chip chased by a jalapeno chip, declared it all good, and came back for more.

So if you'd like to be a hit with a potluck appetizer, even with the kale-adverse group, try this. It's easy! Especially ripping open the potato chip package and dumping it in with the kale chips. I tried to go half and half. By the way, the kale chips disappeared first.

Kale Chips—with a little optional help from Tim 

1. Purchase, or harvest from your garden, one large bunch of kale. Rinse and dry, then remove and discard stems and inner ribs. 
2. Dump the kale into a large bowl and drizzle lightly with olive oil. Most recipes call for one tablespoon.
3. Season the kale carefully with salt* and, if you like, pepper. I included a squirt of Sriracha sauce to befriend Tim's chips. I also sprinkled in a little garlic powder.
4. Mix kale, oil, and seasonings with your hands until evenly coated. 
5. Spread in one layer on two cookie sheets. Parchment paper eases clean-up.
6. Bake in a 250* degree oven for about 30 minutes, or until the chips are dry/crisp. Check after 15 minutes and rearrange chips and/or turn the cookies on oven racks. 
7. Remove chips from the pans and cool on racks.

Mixing with Tim's Jalapeno Potato Chips is optional, of course. But if you're headed to a party,.......Aim to please!
* Kale chip recipes abound, and flavored gourmet salts are popular seasonings, as are curry and pepper flakes. Season sparingly, remembering how that big pile of kale shrinks into a small pile. 
* I've seen recipes calling for higher temps and shorter baking times. I like the cooler oven as the danger of burning the chips is less. 

Spring's A Great Time for Quinoa Veggie Salad

I'm not much on grains in my low-carb life, but am fond of a bit of quinoa mixed 

with veggies  and fresh herbs in a lemony dressing.

I've pretty much given up most grains, but sometimes I crave the "tooth/mouth feel" of little bits of neutral crunch pepped up with citrus and garlic and lots of veggies and herbs. Quinoa is more virtuous than many grains as it's high protein and also loaded with fiber, iron and other nutrients. An ulterior motive for cooking up some quinoa is that we're headed soon to visit our son and daughter-in-law, who is about to pop our second grandchild. She's a vegetarian and I will be cooking. I need to practice! 

Spring is also a good time for a good mood. What with all the color and fragrance and soft, sweet air, and streams rushing with snow melt, and forsythia, cherry and plum trees blooming, and spinach and kale in the cold frame, it reminds us that life begins anew, without fail, every spring. We can count on it, and face it, there's not that much delight promised by the universe. Spring is a given and a gift.

When I die, I hope it will be in spring and my ashes can be troweled into a garden, which may result in tastier tomatoes and greener kale. When you reach a certain age, you are encouraged to fill out forms that inform your loved ones how you would like to be treated as you deteriorate and how you would like to be disposed of when the time comes. Garden, please, however ghoulish you may find that to be. And don't spend any money if you can help it.

Here's a quick, easy, delicious quinoa/veggie salad recipe followed by some recent garden pix.

Quinoa Spring Salad

• 1 cup quinoa, uncooked (makes 2 cups cooked. directions below)
• 1/2 cup slivered almonds or roasted pine nuts
• 1 cup fresh or frozen corn kernels (I used the last of the 2012 frozen corn.)
• 3 tbsp fresh mint leaves, chopped
• 3 tbsp fresh parsley, chopped (flat-leafed Italian preferred)
• 2 radishes, trimmed and thinly sliced
• thin slivers of spinach and/or kale, a generous handful
• 3 tbsp chopped onion, or 3 scallions, sliced
• 3 tbsp chopped sweet red or yellow sweet pepper
• two or three large whole spinach or kale leaves as a bed for the quinoa mixture
• juice of half a lemon
• balsamic vinegar to taste
• 4-5 tbsp olive oil
• 2 small cloves of mashed garlic
• salt and pepper to taste

Note: As with nearly every recipe I post, consider the ingredients as suggestions and use what you have. Don't run to the store for radishes! If you don't have fresh mint or parsley, try something else. Cilantro? Basil? Chives? Arugula? Or even dried herbs.Tinker with the dressing. I usually end up adding more lemon. We're going for tangy and tasty, not bland or sour. 

Directions

Cook the quinoa. Most recipes say to rinse it first to remove a bitter coating. I always do this, but my favorite daughter-in-law does not. She works full time at a high-powered job, reads incessantly, rises at 5 a.m. daily for exercise, has an adorable toddler who wants her attention, and does not suffer fools or fussy recipes. She says she's never tasted bitterness in her cooked quinoa and does not intend to rinse. So be it.

I have the extra 15 minutes. If rinsing, place the quinoa in a fine sieve and place it over a bowl or cooking pot so that you can cover the grain with warm water and swish it around. Let it soak for 15 minutes or up to a half hour. Drain the soaking water and pour fresh water over the quinoa before dumping the rinsed quinoa into a 2-quart cooking pot with a lid.

• 1 cup quinoa
• 1 1/2 cups cold water
• 1/2 tsp salt

Bring quinoa, water and salt to a boil, cover with a tight-fitting lid and turn the heat down to simmer. Cook for 20 minutes. Remove from heat and let it sit for five minutes with the lid on. Uncover and fluff with a fork. Cool.

Add all the veggies and the dressing and taste, taste, taste. Refrigerate to let flavors blend, or serve immediately. Spoon quinoa salad atop large spinach or kale leaves. We ate this with grilled salmon and served it with sliced lemon. Yum! 

Spinach and kale are going bonkers in the cold frame. 

Cold-frame spinach and kale got together with a 2012 storage onion and
discussed the dinner menu. They came up with quinoa salad. 

A parsley "bush" is mined regularly for salads. Sadly, it is a biennial
plant and will go to seed this summer

Spearmint is a blessing and a curse. It is invasive and I must rip it out
of the garden periodically, but it is available most of the year for
seasoning and, now through October, it provides abundant leaves
 for  making sun tea by the gallon. 

Savory Kale, Eggs, Prosciutto—Breakfast!

Eggs, proscuitto, kale, and serrano sauce on a corn tortilla. Yummm.

For  breakfast, most of my life, I ate oatmeal with skim milk, jam on so-called whole wheat toast, an occasional egg, or more likely, Cheerios, Wheaties, Bran Flakes, Corn Flakes and other extruded industrial  processed grain crap. I was on auto pilot.
In those long-ago days, Sunday mornings and special occasions demanded blueberry pancakes, French toast, bread-infested breakfast casseroles and the like. I slowly gained weight, of course, and at one unlovely point, contemplated size 16 jeans. That was shortly before launching into yet another low-fat diet in my yo-yo weight gain/loss life.

Then, about 10 years ago, low-carb became my mantra and breakfast became more problematic. I haven't eaten industrial cereal since 2003, and also gave up bread, for the most part. Without bread, or cereals, including oatmeal, one must be resourceful and forward-thinking, which I often don't feel like being at the crack of 9 a.m. (Retirement! Yeah!)

Now I have another little breakfast problem. I have been advised by a healthcare practitioner to banish dairy. The reason why "no dairy" and how a person is to deal with such deprivation, is fodder (ha ha) for another post, but the short answer is bone spurs.

On a recent morning, unable to enjoy my typical delicious yogurt-based breakfast with berries and low-carb granola,  I went on a hunting expedition in the Amana. Shoving around mouldering bits of this and that, I uncovered prosciutto with an expired pull date, a bunch of kale, and a little feta.

Note: Feta, a brined cheese made from sheep or goat milk, is allowed in seasoning-type amounts by some who promote a dairyless diet. I have grabbed on to this small pleasure until further notice. 

I also unearthed some corn tortillas, which are my major carb splurge, as well a jar of homemade serrano sauce and wonderful organic eggs produced by my wonderful yoga teacher's winsome hens.  She sells the eggs cheep cheep because she says the hens have a high entertainment value. It is good to have an entertained-by-hens yoga teacher.

The breakfast that transpired was beyond satisfactory and has been repeated numerous times. You don't need to be a carb avoider or a dairy swearer-off-er or a nutcase to relish this breakfast entree, which could also pass for lunch or dinner. It is delish and nutrish no matter your condish. 

Ingredients
one serving
2 eggs
2 slices of prosciutto, fat removed
Big handful of tender kale or spinach, torn
Feta or other cheese to taste
Serrano sauce. Sriracha chili sauce is a good substitute.
Corn or flour tortilla, small or medium sized
Olive oil for frying
Salt, pepper to taste

Directions - 10 minutes, start to finish

1. Fry the eggs in a little olive oil. Break the yolks. The eggs pictured are from the yoga teacher's hens, those happy and entertaining little bug and grass eaters who produce incredibly orange yolks. Turn the eggs, unless you prefer runny. Remove from the frying pan and set aside. 

2. Saute the kale or spinach and set aside with the eggs. 

3. Place the tortilla in the hot pan, and melt whatever cheese you prefer in whatever quantity makes your socks roll up and down. I currently avoid most cheese, but at the time  I was uninformed about the hazards of  dairy, and I used a little grated Swiss and some crumbled feta. If you don't want cheese, warm the tortilla in the pan anyway.

4. Place prosciutto on the tortilla to heat, then add the cooked kale or spinach.

5. Arrange the fried eggs on top of everything and spread with serrano chili sauce, if you're lucky enough to have it, or use sriracha chili sauce. I like the tart, hot, tangy taste of both serrano and sriracha, but you could use a milder sauce to give it a little zip.

6. Fold that sucker in half and eat it with your hands. You will be glad you did!

Mining Freezer for Summer Goodness

Summer's berries about to star in a cobbler. These are fresh from the freezer, part of the 2012 garden harvest. 

Winter months are pay-off time for all the garden and kitchen grunt work that occurs August thru October. I whine about toiling to harvest and process food. But dang, it is so satisfying to thaw a quart of ratatouille, crack open a pint of salsa, or dump a frozen rectangle of marinara sauce into the spaghetti pot. We have a large pantry in an unheated porch to stash canned sauces and salsas and winter squash,  and the pump house protects potatoes from freezing.

An old refrigerator in the garage holds apples and onions, and its freezer, once loaded with berries, now keeps pork that was raised nearby. A small upright freezer in our back porch stores chard, kale, berries, corn, peppers, eggplant, green beans, tomatillos, whole Roma tomatoes, pesto, chili verde, walnuts, and chipotle cubes. Ditto the kitchen refrigerator/freezer. Whew. It was a lot of work, but winter meals are a breeze.

About to dive into berry cobbler with vanilla ice cream.

Here's one of my favorites—a delectable melange of summer berries in a relatively low-carb cobbler. This recipe evolved from a berry concoction that used yellow cake mix as the topping. My low-carbing sister, Monette Johnson, ditched the cake mix and substituted oatmeal and a bit of flour. I tweaked further to include almond meal and oat flour. As you can tell, there's a lot of leeway with the topping! It always gets rave reviews. I make this when company is coming. In this case, son Chris, is due home today!

Just out of the oven. Looks like I baked it a bit  too long, but it still tasted great.

Mixed Berry Cobbler
For the fruit layer:
Four to five cups of berries, fresh or frozen: blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries
One 3-ounce package of sugar-free JELL-O, raspberry
One cup of water

For the topping
3/4 stick butter, melted
1/4 cup oat flour
1/4 cup almond flour (or 1/2 cup almond flour and omit the oat flour)
1 1/4 cup old-fashioned oatmeal*
3/4 cup Splenda or equivalent non-sugar sweetner
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

*I've been meaning to eliminate all but a quarter cup of oats and instead mix an equivalent amount of almond and coconut flours with the butter and Splenda for a lower-carb count. If you try that, let me know, please, how it turned out.

Directions
Spread the berries in a 9X13 inch baking dish. Distribute the J-ello powder on the berries, then drizzle with water. Mix the butter, oats, flours, Splenda and walnuts. Sprinkle atop the berries.

Bake at 350 for 45 minutes. Serve warm or cool with ice cream or half and half or unadorned.

Putting Wine in Its Place

Weekdays, wine glasses will be for purposes other than
chardonnay or cabernet sauvignon. *

I know this will come as a terrible shock to my wine-loving friends, and that includes almost all of them, but I'm putting wine in its place. Its place is on weekends and special occasions. It is not for every single day, as it has been for more years than I care to count. Why this sudden loss of sanity? Why the deprivation? The suppression of desire to swill wine while cooking dinner and eating it?

It's about a couple things. Weight is one. I've been seeing the same 3-4-pound-range on the scale for more than 10 years. Ten years ago is when a near-death experience and 9 days in intensive care led to a 15-pound weight loss.  I started to regain the weight (which I was ecstatic to have dumped), because I still believed in the erroneous low-fat-equals-weight-loss theory of dieting. Too many bowls of brown rice, dry baked potatoes, and boxes of fat-free Junior Mints later, I discovered low-carb nutrition. I committed to the lifestyle and yada yada yada. I lost the weight I'd regained and stabilized, with a few minor corrections through the years.

Now, I'd like to drop a jean size or two. But I detest dieting and don't want to give up anything. I already said goodbye to bread, pasta, rice, sugar, potatoes, bananas, wheat and most grains ten years ago. I'm NOT putting aside butter, cream, eggs, meat, berries, olive and coconut oils, mountains of kale, chard, spinach and broccoli, plus a little bit of chocolate at night. What else is there?

Wine.

Let's see. At 3-4 glasses of wine daily, I'm consuming around 15-20 carbs and between 300-600 calories, which adds up to as much as 140 carbs and 4,200 calories a week. Yikes.  I know, I count carbs, not calories. But still. I can't ignore these numbers. PK has suggested several times over the years that we test our shared wine habit with a period of abstinence.  Go ahead, I've always said. I wasn't ready to stare at the stove in the twilight without a glass of wine nearby. What changed my mind?

I'm not sure. Just a gradual dawning that I was indulging a daily habit that, despite claims to wine's health benefits, probably wasn't doing me any good. Plus the fact that the ugly A word kept bobbing  up. After all the years of routine wine-ing, could we really quit?

Yes, it appears, but on our terms. We've decided to drink only on weekends or special occasions, including vacations. So. A couple weeks ago, we put away the corkscrew and Sunday through Thursday did not imbibe. Come Sunday night, we were back on the wagon again for a second week, which included the 3-day MLK weekend, technically a special occasion. Come Monday, though, a return to alcohol-free living. It's been a lot easier than I thought.

The truth is that I needed to push the reset button on everyday drinking. I'm going to stick with it for a year and see what happens. In the meantime, we're spending a week in Mexico soon with a group of friends. It will be a special occasion, indeed, and I will raise a margarita to toast my new relationship with wine.

*Those lovely geraniums are growing in our living room!