Kale Chips

You may have heard about these already; they seem to be a new fad food.  Pieces of kale rubbed with oil and seasonings and dried until crispy.  Well, we love to dry things in pans on our roof in the summer, so we thought we’d try them.  Part of our mixed salad greens seed mix turned out to be this very pretty purple kale, and I figured that chips were meant to be.  So we

then left them on the roof to dry.  We were also playing around with zucchini chips, Swiss chard chips, and just about anything we could stick up there in the brilliant sunshine.

The chips toasted in only about three hours.  They were very crisp and dark, and had reduced in size by about a third.  The first one had a wierd taste to it.  The second one… and we were hooked!  We crunched down several trays of them and one go.  They are extremely nutritious, with calcium and folic acid among other things.  We tried a more complicated recipe as well involving nutritional yeast, but it didn’t do anything special for me.  The dried chard and zucchinis weren’t show-stoppers, either.

I also sauteed de-stemmed kale and it came out so creamy tasting with none of the bitterness that chard has, that it is now my favorite cooked green.

Dried kale can also be ground into a powder or flakes and used to top vegetables and grains for flavor, nutrition and color.  If you use kelp flakes at all, you can substitute dried flaked kale.