Creamy Polenta with Kale and Ricotta

This Food & Wine recipe for polenta with kale and ricotta caught my attention a few weeks ago, and tonight I realized I had all the ingredients, plus some cheese, on hand. I followed the recipe but added a few cups of mozzarella and some fresh parmesan at the end and let it melt into the polenta. I also needed quite a bit of salt to get it to my taste, and I'm not particularly a salt-lover.

Pasta with kale and alfredo sauce

Made up a quick alfredo sauce tonight with random combinations of cheese I had lying around and then boiled the end of three different boxed of pasta I also wanted to use up. Mixed in kale at the end. Great way to use up things filling my kitchen.

Easy way to use Kale

Mix with macaroni and cheese. Seriously, this was delicious and took almost no time to make.

Caldo Verde

Last week I thought about making Caldo Verde-- a Portuguese kale soup-- with my first batch of kale. But it was warm and sunny out and soup just didn't seem right. Today, with a fridge full of kale and rain streaming down my window panes, the idea seemed much more appealing. I based my soup off the recipe I just linked to (here it is again), but with a few variations. The chouriço that the recipe calls for is a smoked sausage. I was using raw chorizo so I cooked it all-- along with garlic and onions-- before I started, then took out about three-quarters of it to set aside before I boiled the red potatoes in that same pan. Once the potatoes were getting mushy, I realized I didn't really want to take everything out and food process it-- I like my soup chunky, for one thing, and was too hungry to add this step, for another thing. So I simply stuck my potato masher right into the pot, and mashed up the potatoes while keeping the onion and chorizo chunks whole, and some bigger chunks of pototo remaining. Then I added the chorizo I'd set aside and kale and let it simmer for quite awhile--closer to 20 minutes, I'd say, than the 2 minutes the recipe calls for. In the end, my potaotes were so cooked and mashed up it probably wasn't any different in texture than if I'd pureed them.

The soup turned out great-- I appreciated the taste of the kale in this much more than when I made curried turnovers with the kale last week (curry does tend to mask flavors I suppose). I would definitely consider making this soup with other greens-- spinach for example-- but liked the flavor of the kale a lot. The chorizo I got was nice and spicy too, which added to the flavor of the soup.

Curried Kale-White Bean Turnovers

Scanning the web for kale recipes, I came across lots of soups, but decided today wasn't a soup day at all. Instead, these Jamacian Style Curried Kale and White Bean 'Patties' looked like something new and different to try. I basically followed the recipe, but added lots of extra crushed red pepper and curry powder. And then decided to fold my mixture into triangle-shaped turnovers with the pastry dough, instead of making "patties" in muffin tins. Worked out great and made enough to last me three or four meals, with salads using my mixed greens.