The Kale Situation

Many moons ago, when the summer air was turning toward cool autumn temperatures, I was busy planting seedlings in my garden. I have three 4x6 planter boxes in the front yard, and I try to keep them going with various goodies. At the farmers' markets, there are always vendors selling various seasonal seedlings - greens, herbs, veggies, berries, and so on. So, all those months ago, I bought four 6-packs: Dino Kale, Winterbor Kale, and two Collards - and planted them all in the ground. By the grace of god, one of my collards turned out to be a 6-pack of broccoli, and three of the other collards never really went anywhere.

Nonetheless, I have been eating a lot of greens. That's fine, because (obviously) I like greens. But Mr. Vegan Eats & Treats most vehemently does not - so I'm not really sure why I went quite so overboard with the planting.

A few weeks ago, with the advent of springy weather, I noticed that ALL 12 kale plants and 3 surviving collards were beginning to bolt (flower and go to seed), and it was much, much more than I could comfortably consume in such a short time.

So, over the last couple of weeks, whenever time allowed, I have been harvesting and processing and freezing mountains and mountains of greens for later consumption. I followed the instructions on this helpful site.

Here's a batch of greens all laid out to go into the freezer. The only problem with this method of freezing them is that the frozen greens are very bulky... so when you transfer them to the baggies, they take up a lot of room. I officially am OUT OF ROOM in the freezer...

... due to about 11 or 12 sandwich baggies full of frozen kale and collards. Wooo hooo! I cleared out the planter boxes, amended the soil, and will soon be ready to plant a summer garden again. Yippee!

Also, thanks to the encouragement of my loving PPK friends, I finally tried my hand at the famous Kale Chips - basically kale bits tossed with olive oil and touch of salt and roasted for about 10 minutes at 375. I think I may have roasted them a little too long? Maybe some of you kale chip experts out there in cyberland can tell me if they look right or not. They are quite good, even if maybe a little overdone. I haven't run them through the Mr. VE&T test yet, but we'll give it a go later tonight...

EMERGENCY UPDATE: Mr. VE&Ts from the kitchen "Oh, those are good!" ...pause... "These are REALLY good!" ... pause ... "I guess I like kale." zing! bang! wooo!

In the meantime, I'm quite relieved to have that Kale Monkey off my back, and a freezer full of ready-to-eat good stuff!

ps. Next up, The Escarole Situation