ANOTHER KALE POST

Ok ok. i realize i haven't posted in a long long time. To be honest, I have been eating out, but not anywhere new. So unless you want another post about Victoria's, you'll just have to wait until I eat out somewhere new. (Hopefully you'll get some musings about donuts and Korean food this weekend).

Meanwhile, I've also failed to take pics for this post. Was too busy cooking. But i just wanted to share with all of you this great recipe from epicurious.com. As you all know, I normally turn first to foodtv.com when looking for recipes. In my boston organics order this week, I got yet another order of kale, though while tasty, i really have no idea what to use it for. And all the foodtv.com recipes were of some variation of portuguese sausage soup. Luckily, there was epicurious to the rescue. They had 66 different kale recipes, and I saved like 5 potential ones. I really considered the kale with polenta, but I'd just made polenta last week. So i went with this recipe, for mashed potatoes with kale. (since I had also gotten potatoes in my boston organics order).

ingredients:

1 cup milk
8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter
1 small carrot, peeled, diced
1 large bay leaf

1 large onion, chopped
1 large bunch kale, rinsed, coarsely chopped (about 8 cups)

4 pounds russet potatoes, peeled, cut into 1-inch pieces

Combine milk, 2 tablespoons butter, carrot and bay leaf in medium saucepan; bring to simmer. Remove from heat; let steep while preparing kale and potatoes.

Melt 1 tablespoon butter in large Dutch oven over medium heat. Add onion; sauté until light brown, about 8 minutes. Add kale; cover and cook until tender, stirring often, about 25 minutes.

Meanwhile, cook potatoes in large pot of boiling salted water until tender, about 25 minutes. Drain well. Return to same pot; mash with hand masher.

Add kale mixture to potatoes. Strain in enough milk to produce moist, fluffy potatoes. Season with salt and pepper.

Melt 5 tablespoons butter in small saucepan. Mound potatoes in large bowl. Using spoon, make well in top of potatoes. Pour butter into well. Serve hot.

So the other thing i like about epicurious.com is that people can post comments after they've tried out the recipe. So i took a tip from one of them and incorporated the butter into the mashed potatoes rather than pooling it on top. I also made my only little variation by omitting the bay leaf and carrot and steeping some fresh rosemary instead, and that turned out great.

My only regret was adding in too much milk. It caused the potatoes to be a bit too mushy. So add the milk slowly so you don't get some better results. Allright. Pictures this weekend. Promise.