GourmandeMom™

New favorite fast food dinner thing: kale

When I don't know what to cook, I just heat up some olive oil in the Le Creuset, prep some garlic, and throw it in there - on low heat to allow me time to think before it burns.  [Tip: You may be in a relationship with a non-food person if the smell of garlic/olive oil/onions leads to "what stinks in here?" versus "wow something smells good!"]  Even if I don't know what I'm doing yet, the ritual of prepping garlic is comforting: peel skin, cut off hard ends, slice into slivers, slice cross-wise again - and off it goes into the olive oil.  I figure inspiration will come eventually. 

When inspiration comes though it helps to have a nicely stocked fridge. I was out of haricots verts.  And no meaty portobellos.  What to do.  Ah - yes.  Plenty of kale still from the first round of kale chips.  Why not throw some of that nice bright green organic kale in there?  And so I did.

The onions had gone is as well by then.  

Sea salt, freshly ground pepper added. 

Just as the kale starts to wilt, I toss it around with the garlic and olive oil and onions. Taste for a little more salt and pepper.

Meanwhile, I had a thin wedge of wild salmon searing nearby on another burner.  

A matter of taste how well done you want the kale.  I like to keep it a pretty color of green, but just softened up and nicely heated through with tasty garlic olive oil.

Before you know it, it's all done, and in about the time it took to peel and chop the garlic cloves (I like about 3 cloves of garlic). 

1.    Load up a white plate with the beautiful steaming hot garlicky kale.  

2.    Place salmon on top.  

Seriously, no more than 12 minutes start to finish on this.   Even taking into account some short defrosting time on the salmon, this is no more time-intensive than fixing Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.

So enamoured of kale now - the texture (those cute ruffly leaves), the healthy sound of it, the color once it starts to cook down - I'm thinking about serving it up for the Reveillon, my Christmas Eve "feast."    Though I don't think I can get much better than the garlic and olive oil for simple and healthy, I'm looking around for more recipes.  There are plenty.  Kale is new in the rotation for me, to get out of the cruciferous vegetable rut, but nothing new at all to most of the rest of the civilized food world.

Here are some of the recipes on my list to change up the kale recipe rut I suspect I already am in:

Kale Pesto - from A Cozy Kitchen blog (love the pistachios in the recipe) 

Sauteed Kale - from Anne Burrell (like the chili flakes and touch of chicken stock there at end)

Crispy Kale Chips - Melissa d'Arabian (nothing here but kale, olive oil, salt)

Krispy Tuscan Kale - Anne Burrell (lower temperature than Melissa's recipe, longer time, adds chili flakes)

Kale Chips - from the adorable can't-get-enough-of-each-other food couple Pat and Gina Neely (brown sugar sprinkled over the finished chips...cannot endorse this as appropriate per newfound (fleeting) self-righteousness during The Cleanse but must explore eventually in the interest of science...maybe the kids would like it?)

And there are more out there.  BBQ kale chips, Crispy Kale Chips with Lemon...kale is really everywhere it seems now that it's on my food radar. I would not  be surprised if some food startup entrepreneur was already experimenting with how to mass produce kale chips as a snack food.  Or maybe that's something to add to my to-do list.

"Pretentious Food Jerk" (a Craig Thornton term - way better than "foodie") and Food Life from afar (while cleansing/detoxing)

(seriously overlarge cauliflower purchased on veggie loading trip to Central Market)

I like food.  And wine.  And cocktails (like wine more).  And like enjoying those things with my friends and family.  And also like those things at the many solo "aperitif" times in my kitchen with TSF Jazz, Paris's 24-hour jazz station, keeping me company.

But sometimes enough is enough.  And so it is that I am on this 21-day cleanse thing.  "Purification," rather, under the supervision of my functional endrocrinologist.  How perfect to get back to basics and detox the system between that crazy time of Thanksgiving and Christmas.  How much weight do we gain in this time?  I am forestalling that.  But it means going to some parties and exercising such extreme will power that it surprises even me. 

Now into week 2, day 8, and now that I'm in the cleansing groove and feeling great after a couple of (typical) rough days at the beginning, a funny thing has happened. By withdrawing from the food world, at least in part, I can observe.  How I act with food, interact with it, use and abuse the tasting of this and that.   How I use and abuse it in social settings.  Some events I've almost not attended, for how on earth could one possibly enjoy an evening with the girlfriends at the W and not have a precious glass of red wine.  Or one of those gorgeous cocktails. It was awkward, but in the end it made no difference at all. I still reveled in the sultry coolness of the place and the company of friends.  No wine did nothing to diminish the evening. Shock.  It may have enhanced it.  

But all the more shocking now: how insidiously our popular culture has immersed itself in processed foods.  When you've had a protein drink, some supplements, and a nice sparse green salad at the only place at the airport such a thing could be found ("no nuts or seeds, no cheese - not even a sprinkle - and dressing on the side, please"), the airport food landscape of french fries, Coke, and Cinnabons looks grotesquely surreal.

(baking sheet of torn pieces of washed and dried fresh organic kale, drizzled with 1 tsp of extra virgin olive oil and sea salt and paprika to be baked for 15 minutes or so at 350 - careful to not burn them. And, well, I may have had just about the whole "serving" that baking sheet made...they shrink when they cook!)

In this intense state of mindfulness about food and food experience, I pick up the December 3 issue of The New Yorker at the airport: "The Food Issue."  I almost read it cover to cover - the food articles.  They are exquisitely written. 

Of note for now: "Annals of Gastronomy: Toques from Underground...the rise of the secret supper club," by Dana Goodyear, focusing on freak of nature wunderkind anti-chef, Craig Thornton and his Wolvesmouth dinners in L.A.   He's young.  Creative.  Sort of insane I think.  As every true artist probably is.  Example:

 "At a dinner last winter, when he learned that one of this regular guests was about to turn forty, he proposed cooking a forty-course meal to celebrate.  It was a typical Wolvesmouth dinner, miniaturized and quadrupled, and served in four hours. (Course No. 24: 'chicken liver mousse, pickled pear, watermelon radish, brioche, fleur de sel' No. 31: 'lobster, celery root remoulade, black sesame, cherry-white soy vinaigrette.')." 

He is very anti-bad food and anti-establishment and fame (for now), while catering to and relying on the "foodie" and the "foodie movement."  And here I and millions of others would agree with him.  

Hate the word "foodie."  (Page 52)

Of his two alternatives, "super food asshole" and "pretentious food jerk," I am leaning toward the latter.

The New Yorker article tells us: he is 30 and skinny.  Doesn't drink or smoke.  Rarely sleeps.  He once drove across the country, losing 15 pounds en route, because he could not stand to eat road food along the way.  (Page 46).

So I get it now.  This purification thing is a forced realization of the everyday toxins of the popular food culture.  It reminds that a pretentious food jerk is really, at bottom, nothing more than someone taking a stand against the Cinnabon as an accepted norm and insisting on quality over quantity.  

My mom recently asked me where this love of food--how it looks, tastes, is made and experienced--comes from.  Don't know.  I know I had this early on in that previous life of mine, where I vocally detested and abhorred chain restaurants. I did not have the "foodie" vocabulary back then (early 1990s), but I considered it a waste of a food experience - and calories.  (When I was treated to a birthday dinner at a chain restaurant I should have clued in that this relationship was not looking good for long-term possibilities.) 

If it is pretentious to demand that the calories I choose to expend be good ones, well-grown, seasoned and consumed with thoughts given to the food system that created it, so be it. I am a PFJ.

(part of the Thanksgiving photoscape...(one of many) platter(s) of bacon)