Kale and Spinach and Yes, More Lettuce

My take for week four: four heads of lettuce, two pounds of spinach, kale, collards, arugula, and more pick-your-own strawberries and snap peas.

I focused on preparing kale this week because it’s a vegetable I’ve never tried before. My familiarity with kale is limited to seeing it used as a ruffled doily underneath sandwiches and burgers on my plate. Delis seem to use kale as a frilly border for potato salad. Well, it’s time to bring kale to the fore and make a dish out of it. Raw, kale tastes like a cross between broccoli and cabbage. Cooked, it has a mild cabbage flavor.

Bringing kale to the fore proved difficult. Kale still seems like a side dish to me so I made it with peanut sauce. I probably overdid the peanut sauce because it was a little heavy on the sauce. It was tasty to me despite my inability to convince anyone else to try it.

Kale in Peanut Sauce
(adapted from How to Cook Everything)
(Print this recipe)

2 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
1 Tbsp. chopped garlic
1 lb. kale
1/4 c. chicken stock (or vegetable stock if you want vegetarian)
3 Tbsp. peanut butter
Salt and pepper
2 Tbsp. freshly squeezed lemon juice

In a deep skillet over medium heat, heat the oil until hot.  Add garlic and cook, stirring, until golden brown. Add the kale, stock, peanut butter and salt and pepper. Cover and cook until the kale is wilted, about five minutes.  After five minutes, uncover and cook another five minutes.  Remove from heat and add the lemon juice. Adjust the seasonings, if necessary.  Serve hot or at room temperature.

Blanching and Freezing Spinach

With so much produce, it’s time to get serious about preserving some of this goodness, else risk spoilage. There is not much one can do about lettuce but the other greens lend themselves to freezing. I ordered Preserving Summer’s Bounty to learn how to freeze, dry and can a variety of vegetables. Freezing turns out to be quite easy. You just blanch the vegetable in question, shock it in ice water, dry it off and freeze it.  Of course "easy" doesn't always mean "quick."

Having frozen spinach on hand means I can top homemade pizzas with it or drop some in omelets for extra flavor and nutrition.  I also sneak it into homemade Asian-style dumplings.  Amazingly, spinach is a vegetable my son has always liked. My daughter has never touched a vegetable in her life so I continue to experiment with trying to sneak vegetables into her.

To freeze spinach, in a large pot, bring at least a gallon of water to a rolling boil. Use a gallon of water per pound of vegetable. While the water is coming to a boil, wash and trim the spinach and discard wilted leaves. Prepare a large bowl about a third full of ice water. Once the water boils, drop the spinach in and wait for the water to come back to a rolling boil. Once it is at a boil again, set your timer for two minutes. After the spinach has blanched, pull it out and drop it in the ice water. This shocks the spinach and prevents it from cooking further. Let it cool. Pull it out and dry it out on paper or kitchen towels. Divide into batches or leave as one big batch (whatever you need) and put into freezer-safe containers. Freeze, then bag and stack more efficiently in the freezer.

I separated mine into four half-cup plastic containers. The volume of spinach went from this:

…to this: