I have been staring at the Kale we grew in the garden for some time now wondering what I can do with it to make it edible. Last winter we ordered the Kale seeds I was hearing all kinds of stories about how healthy it was to add Kale to your morning smoothie. In the spring I tried adding some Kale to my breakfast smoothie and I was surprised at how much it ruined the taste of my smoothie. I added one leaf and it made it taste like I was eating weeds. Yuck!
I knew I was going to have to find something different to do with the kale. Clearly, freezing it for smoothies was out of the question. I tried a recipe a while back that was really good, called http://pinchofyum.com/chopped-thai-salad-sesame-garlic-dressing but it was also a lot of prep work and specialty ingredients I did not always have on hand. I decided to try making Kale chips. I had done a fair amount of reading so I knew I needed to remove the stems, wash it and hand rub the seasonings on the leaves. I broke out the salad spinner, it always surprises me how handy the crazy salad spinner is with my garden produce, It does make washing and drying quite simple without crushing them.
Next I rubbed each leaf with olive oil. This was tedious but I did notice if you drench the leaves in olive oil they loose their firmness so I tried to just get the olive oil on my hands and rub it on instead. Then I placed each leaf on a cookie sheet lined with nonstick foil. I tried to keep them on a single layer as much as I could. I sprinted some salt and pepper over them. I put them in the over at 325 degrees for 15 minutes and here is how they looked when they came out of the oven.
I was not sure it worked at first but they are crispy and not burned. From what I read it is easy to burn the edges of the kale when trying to get the leaf crispy. They are very thin and easily crumble into tiny crumbs. They don’t taste like much. Its a good think I put salt and pepper on them because that is about all I can taste. They do have a nice quiet crunch in your mouth when you bite into them.
(Yes, that is one of my drink wraps from my Etsy shop in the background)
