A title for my book of recipes for greens and green vegetables, I haven’t figured out yet, but I’ve been developing more dishes for them. It isn’t a vegan cookbook, although it mostly will be. About a third of the recipes utilize meat or dairy but the central ingredient is green vegetables.
Although I’ve put on hold a casserole I'd been tinkering with, I’m taking away from it a new way of preparing kale, in milk, making it bright and sweet.
Poor kale was so over-hyped as a vegetable It Girl that the tables were turned and she became more scorned than hyped. When I accidentally moved to Vancouver, British Columbia 15 years ago, I came across kale for the first time in my life, where it had been a gardeners’, farmers’ and ever supermarket favorite for generations, and is very commonly eaten. It is one of the handful of vegetables which truly thrive in this rainforest on the coast, and which is more delicious from local soil than any I’ve tasted elsewhere, or the imported ones. The comparatively slight frost of a Vancouver winter sweetens kale while a colder, longer winter leaves it more bitter in the spring.
Common Curly Kale with its bunchy crunch is generally my preferred variety but Locinato Kale aka Cavolo Nero is my favorite for a use where silkiness is more enjoyable.
The casserole I’d been rearranging was essentially of an entire bunch of curly kale, cooked crisp bacon diced small, and macaroni baked in a mixture of whole milk with warm, mild chili pepper, the fat from the cooked bacon, and egg yokes. It’s really very nice but it can’t satisfy truly until I can find some smaller pasta, Anelli maybe. In between finalizing a pasta, I’ve kept cooking kale in milk. The casserole was something I threw together from bits and pieces one night, and the way the kale turned out after being put raw into the milk mix and cooked in the casserole, was surprising bright and lovely.
My green book will have a few key kale recipes, and one will definitely be curly kale baked in milk with crisped bacon, enriched with egg yokes.
Zucchini will feature a lot too. I know so many gardeners who struggle to get through their summer bounty of zucchini but personally I can happily eat it several times a week in the season, and I don’t mind it out of season either. I feel indignant about lovely seasonal zucchini getting grated up and hidden away in cakes and breads, never tasted at its most delicious. Most often I eat it for breakfast, sliced into rounds with maybe a small scrubbed unpeeled potato, sliced into a rounds also, with some garlic and onion, pan fried in olive oil. I like to have a few more formal uses however.
I’ve almost finished developing a dish I’ve named Zucchini Chop. For a meal for two, I wash and remove the stems from two firm zucchini and slice them evenly in half lengthwise. I slice the long half down the middle lengthwise again but the skin isn’t pierced or broken. The long zucchini half will be bent open but not snapped. Into the slit I stuff lemon slices, tip to tip. The four halves are salted all round including the skin, placed in a shallow dish with two spring onions, sprayed with finely ground black pepper and baked hard in a very hot oven with the juice of one lemon and olive oil.
The mild, almost herb-like quality of spring onions (sometimes called green onions or scallions) is greatly preferable to me when working with the quiet roundness of zucchini.
They are lovely eaten just like this but Zucchini Chop becomes a complete meal when their melting citrus tang is paired with a sweet-chili pork chop. Two thick cut pork chops are carefully covered in a very fine rub of dried chili - a warm mix of Arbol and Chipotle, one brown sugar cube, sea salt, and dash of Tamari soy sauce. They are roasted on a slotted tray above baking zucchini, which catches the dripping fat from the pork chops as they cook.
A variant w red cabbage instead of zucchini
An early iteration of Zucchini Chop