It's Not Easy Being Green

Green. There is not one thing from our CSA this week that is not green. Unless you count the four pints of blueberries and I don't like blue foods. When I told friends I was signing up for a CSA, I received many a warning about the green foods. People said to start looking for kale recipes STAT. Rumour had it I was going to be flooded by kale. Well-meaning friends sent information on kale soup, turkey and kale chili, and kale chips. The kale worried me. Yet, never did I imagine that I would have to plan meals around kale and every other green food all in the same week.

Our monocolor palette for this week is:
2 cucumbers
1 bunch small-ish turnips with lovely greens still on
1 bunch parsley
1 galaxy lettuce (has red tips to the leaves)
1 head escarole
1 head romaine
1 bunch chard
1 bunch kale
1 pint peas
2 zucchini
and the aforementioned blueberries

I started out on Saturday by making one of my favorite summer foods which is Mom Salad. Mom Salad is finely-sliced cucumbers and onion marinated in vinegar and sugar. My mom always has a tupperware dish full of this chilling in the fridge during the summer. I knew I was marrying into the right family when David's cousin Rachel showed up to Passover one year with a vat of Mom Salad and everybody got excited.

The lettuces would make for easy, if not repetetive, side salads. I hit the cheese and nut aisles at TJs to get some interesting salad toppings and was impressed with the new rosemary nuts. I let Ella make a romaine salad with the nuts and some parmesean. Turns out she is an excellent lettuce washer, lettuce shredder, and topping sprinkler. The salad spinner is her new favorite toy and she likes to put her felt pancakes in there to spin them. The salad was a lovely, crisp side to a peas, pesto, and goat cheese pasta.

So that left the kale. The kale. David informed me that he had some experience with kale on some windmill farm commune-type place he lived on in Martha's Vineyard one summer. He stated that kale is the most nutritious and cheap food on the planet and said I stood a fighting chance with the kale if I used lots of onion. My "confetti kale" recipe from Simply in Season had no onion, but I chopped up the last of the garlic scapes and tossed them in. I followed the directions to a t and the dish was gorgeous, but the kale was just too tough for me. Ella and I picked out the confetti part (corn and orange peppers) and left the rest for David. He then informed me that he had also learned on the windmill farm that you had to "just kill it, just kill the kale" which means to cook it for at least 40 minutes. This might have been one of the few times I would have appreciated some backseat driving in the kitchen! He made up for it by making blueberry pancakes the next morning.