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The Middle Way

January 27, 2010 in Orange and Green, Recipes | 1 comment

Kale salad and baked sweet potato fries

One of my favorite meals to order in a restaurant is French fries and a salad (but only if the fries are really good and come with a delicious dipping sauce, like the duck-fat fries with brown butter béarnaise sauce at Orson, or the fries with harissa aioli at Nopa). But that is not really a meal in the spirit of the season of resolve. As we learn from the Buddha, the middle way is best.

And so I present, French fries and a salad, Buddha-style:

Take some sweet potatoes; cut them into wedges; toss with olive oil, salt, and pepper; and maybe some cayenne or chili powder. Spread them out on a baking sheet in a single layer. Bake at 425 for 30 minutes or so, turning occasionally.

The kale salad is another recipe from my friend K., via her father-in-law who had this salad at a restaurant in Aspen. From Aspen to Portland to San Francisco to you. Nothing could be easier. Take some kale (curly or dino, whichevs); separate it from its ribs; and chop it up very, very fine until you basically have a pile of kale confetti. Finely mince a shallot. Put it all in a salad bowl. Add a generous handful of parmigiano cut into a fine dice. Toss in a handful of currants and pine nuts. Squeeze a lemon over the whole thing and drizzle on some olive oil. Add some Maldon sea salt if you’re feeling fancy, or just plain kosher salt. Toss to coat.

Kale salad also goes well with a baguette and pate, but that might be a meal for another season, too.

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The Innovator

January 25, 2010 in Orange and Green, Recipes | No comments

Pasta with kale pesto and roasted winter squash

This is my new favorite orange-and-green combo, thanks to Melissa Clark of The New York Times. Yes, it’s a lot of carbohydrates. She originally wrote this recipe to fuel a marathoner, so if you don’t think you’re going to need a few hundred extra calories to get through your day, you could skip the pasta part. That’s what I thought I would do, but it’s so good with the pasta—even gluten-free spaghetti made from corn and quinoa—that I usually keep it in. This dish also works well with polenta.

The recipe is pretty perfect as written by Ms. Clark in the Times.

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The Holiday Edition

January 25, 2010 in Orange and Green, Recipes | No comments

Baked kale with gruyere and sweet potato-poblano gratin

I first came up with the idea for an orange-and-green series back in November, when winter squash were everywhere and the season stretched long before us. But now it’s almost the end of January and the supply of local squash is dwindling down to butternut, acorn, and spaghetti. So, forthwith, the rest of the recipes!

Let’s go back in time to Thanksgiving. The baked kale and sweet potato gratin were my contribution to the table this year. The traditional Thanksgiving palette runs the narrow stretch of neutrals between beige and white, so it’s nice to see some pops of color on the plate. The challenge with The Holiday Edition is dealing with the quantity of kale it takes to fill a 9 x 13 pan after being sautéed with shallots and onion. Kale is not a ruly vegetable. It has not a single ounce of rule in it, and just the draft caused by turning around will make it fly all over the place. You’ll probably also run out of bowls for washing it in. Definitely use two pans to sauté it all. Even with two pans, it doesn’t all fit right away, so I add it in batches as it wilts down.

And beware, the gratin calls for the use of the most bloodthirsty tool in the kitchen: the mandoline. Keep your band-aids close by and be prepared to give up some fingernails/fingertips. The sacrifice is worth it. While I’m not entirely sure what this says about the gratin, it was pronounced the best side dish on the Thanksgiving table by a man who doesn’t really eat vegetables.

If you have any gratin and gruyere left over, put the gratin in a dish, top it with the cheese, and pop it in the oven at 400 degrees. After 15 minutes, crack two eggs on top, bump the heat up, and cook for another 5 minutes or so, until the whites are set but the yolks are runny.

The kale comes from a recipe found in Food and Wine a few years back and I adapted the gratin from this recipe in last year’s Thanksgiving issue of Gourmet. All I did was substitute sweet potatoes for the potatoes.

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