Friday Fabulous Foliage

Fall foliage can be very colorful.  This bed was planted for the purpose of colorful foliage in the fall, indeed, the late fall because this "flowering" kale laughs at cold weather.  And it grows pretty easily. However as my best garderner buddy likes to say, "Kale grows easily and likes cold weather, but the trouble with growing kale is that when you're done, what you have grown is kale."  TPP is not a huge fan of kale as a green, but you can make one heck of a great soup with kale, and a local farm to fork chef made us a kale slaw that was pretty good (but a bit of a chew).  At any rate after looking at the flowering kale for awhile you can make it into soup.  TPP was asked about this awhile back and another soup recipe was linked here.  TPP is making some today.

That was some spicy soup - a typo?

The Phactors have been part of a monthly dinner group for nearly 40 years. Out last meeting featured a Portuguese spicy kale soup (caldo verde), almost a national dish.  It's made with a spicy sausage, chicken broth, and a lot of kale.  The soup turned out extremely spicy even though the person who prepared the soup only used half of the 14 teaspoons of black pepper the recipe called for.  Now that is a crap load of black pepper by anyone's standards and even with just 7 tsp the soup was on the edge of what most of us could deal with.  This number, 14 tsp bothered TPP, because having made this soup years ago, he had no memory of extreme spiciness, and a quick google search could not find a recipe calling for so much pepper. The soup basically relies on the sausage for the spicy taste and most to the recipes called for 1/4 tsp of black pepper for a recipe using 12 to 16 ounces of sausage, a typical batch for 6-8 servings.  14 was such an odd number, but what if the recipe got copied or transcribed wrongly deleting the / between the 1 and 4 thus increasing the amount of black pepper by 56 times.  Now that is spicy, although we sometimes don't think of black pepper as that spicy.  At least the anti-bacterial qualities of that much black pepper certainly protected us from any contamination on the kale.

Lentil, sausage, and parsnip soup

The voting did not take long to count: 1 for parsnips, none for anything else, so parsnips it is.  Parsnips were a favorite vegetable of my youth.  Parsnips, carrots, and salsify were always planted where the snow, and there was always snow because this area was (is) the Lake Ontario snow belt, drifted over the straw mulched garden.  This meant that the soil didn't freeze and these crops could be harvested at any old time so long as you shovelled away the snow and moved the straw, but that's exactly what we did every 2-3 weeks.  Now that's fresh.  Here's a favorite soup recipe.

12 oz pork sausage links
1 medium onion chopped
1 1/3d cup lentils
3-5 medium parsnips, peeled and cut into 1/4 inch slices (chunks)
1 clove garlic minced
16 oz canned tomatoes with juice
1/4 tsp marjoram
salt to taste
Swiss cheese shredded
 Prep time: 1.5 hr.
In a covered heavy pot or dutch oven, cook sausage in 2 tsp water for 5 min at medium heat, then remove the cover and continue cooking until the sausage is nicely browned.  Remove the sausage, drain, cool, and cut into chunks.  Set aside.  Pour off all but 1-2 tsp of fat.  Add parsnips, onions, and garlic; cook over medium heat for about 5 min.  Stir in the lentils, marjoram, 5 cups of water, and the tomatoes.  Heat to boiling, reduce heat to low, cover and simmer for 25-30 min or until lentils are tender.  Add sausage chunks and cook until heated.  Salt to taste.  Serve with healthy amount of shredded Swiss cheese.  Very nice with crusty bread on the side. 

This recipe can convince people that both lentils and parsnips are mighty tasty. 

Can you eat flowering kale?

A curious reader wants to know if you can eat flowering kale?  Yes.  That was easy.  Flowering kale differs from regular kale in having short internodes so the leaves make a dense rosette of leaves.  It also forms pigments, or not, often in the leaves in the center of the rosette, so the overall effect is that of a flower, sort of.  Nonetheless, just like garden kale, flowering kale is quite resistant to cool weather and frosts providing garden color and design when most things are going dormant for the winter.  In fact kale is actually better tasting after exposure to some cold temperatures.  You can eat flowering kale just like regular kale.  One of the best ways to use kale is in soups; here's one example, a Portuguese kale soup.  HT to Jardin botanique de Montréal for making this picture available via the Wikimedia Creative Commons.