FitFool

This dish is so good that I've felt a little guilty for not posting this one sooner. My sister served this up once when she hosted dinner and I was enchanted by how pretty it looked and how yummy it tasted -- all while still being quite healthy. I think it's a great way to get more vegetables in your diet. I was surprised that the original recipe said kale's not just for braising since I've mostly used it in soups and pasta dishes. (Then again, once we had Crispy Kale Chips, I was kind of reluctant to do anything else with kale.)

The active prep time is a bit longer if you're starting with just the butternut squash and need to peel and cube it yourself. (Or at least, it takes me longer.) To prep the butternut squash yourself, use a big knife to cut off the top and bottom of the squash. Now slice it lengthwise in half. Scoop out the seeds and save those for later to make Fried Squash Seeds. Use a vegetable peeler to peel off the skin. Then cut it up into half-inch-sized cubes.

The last couple times I've made this, I've prepped the vegetables on the weekend (roasted the butternut squash, torn up the kale) and then assembled and heated it up on the stove top for a quick meal during the week. Don't cook the kale ahead of time since it loses a bit of its brightness upon reheating. If I'm doing it all at once, I'll get the butternut squash into the oven first, and then while that's roasting, I'll prep the kale and chop nuts.

Seems to hold up well to substitutions too. My sister doesn't like onions so we left out the shallots. Later when I made it, I substituted in onion since I didn't have any shallots. We used other squashes instead of butternut squash, different hard cheeses like pecorino and manchego instead of parmesan, and substituted various roasted seasoned nuts for the almonds. The most amazing nut we've used was garlic-seasoned macadamia nuts. All times, it's been scarfed down pretty happily. My boyfriend is generally indifferent to kale (except for kale chips) and butternut squash but he gobbled this up contentedly. Hope you like this too!


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For a while there, it seemed to be all the rage to post Crispy Kale photos. It sounded intriguing but I just filed it away in the Recipes To Try folder. My boyfriend doesn't care much for kale, you see. So we got spinach instead for our leafy greens. But then last summer I saw kale chips being sold for $8 for a small box and remembered that I had seen lots of posts online about making them at home. So a few more months later, I finally tried it. Yum! When I finally got around to trying the recipe, just as so many of those other food bloggers had written, my thought was "I'm sorry I waited so long to try this!" Just a very light crispy texture that melts away in your mouth. After the first batch, I learned to serve it up with each of us getting our own bowl so we didn't fight over the last bites.

Made this for my sister's family too when I visited her. Her husband hadn't eaten kale before and found he loved it. Even before we had popped it into the oven, he tried a piece of the oiled kale and liked eating it raw. I don't really like kale until it's been cooked but this seems like a great recipe for winning over people who say they don't like kale. Or maybe good for using the kale that keeps showing up in your CSA box.

For my first batch, I forgot the chipotle powder so I used salt and a few squeezes of lime juice and that enough to get us hooked. I remembered chipotle powder for the second batch and that adds good measure of heat to this snack.

The trickiest part is baking them long enough to get everything uniformly crispy but then not so long that it burns. It's a very fine line between almost-done and irredeemably burnt. Seems to be important to keep them in a single layer. It might also be helped by making the pieces more of a consistent size. Is smaller better than bigger? Not sure on that. Apparently you can make the pieces too small. My sister tried using the ready-washed and cut bags of kale at the grocery store and those burned. Maybe she could've used them if she had pulled them out of the oven sooner.

I've had lots of good luck with recipes from SimplyRecipes.com. Here's a quick and easy one for zucchini. I just tossed the zucchini pieces with the garlic and olive oil, and then lined the zucchini slices up on the baking sheet with the skin side down. Needed to cook a little over 10 minutes at 450F. Very tasty and smells great. Served it up as a side dish with Rosemary Lemon Garlic Chicken Wings. Oh and I'm tagging this one gluten-free. If I'm wrong about that, let me know.

*gasp* It's been hot and humid. On one of these muggy nights, I asked my boyfriend, "What do you want for dinner? I could make something with the sausage and zucchini or I saw a recipe for..."

He interrupted me with, "... anything that doesn't involve adding any more heat to this apartment!"

I had been meaning to try this mixed bean salad recipe and I had most of the ingredients in the house. I'm glad I made it. It's easy to make, filling, and tasty (and even tastier the next day). It keeps well in the fridge so you can make it ahead and pack a lunch the next day. It doesn't need to be reheated so you can bring it to a potluck. And if you use canned beans, you don't have to heat up your apartment.

You ever cut up a head of cauliflower, wonder if those green leaves and stem bits are edible, and then toss them into the garbage? I have. But when I was searching for recipes that use chickpea flour, I stumbled across this use for cauliflower leaves and now I don't have to waste any of it. Crispy and tasty side dish or snack. Best eaten while still hot. Now I can get a second dish out of a head of cauliflower when I make Honey Curry-Roasted Cauliflower

I found the chickpea flour (also called gram flour or besan) in an Indian grocery store. It's ground from chickpeas so I imagine this would also work as a gluten-free recipe.

Sorry I couldn't come up with a shorter and catchier name but at least the finished result is pleasing enough that I made up a second batch immediately. (OK, so I made the second batch because I had all the ingredients on hand already but I would've wanted more anyhow.)

Came up with this side dish to accompany Chicken Breasts in a Middle Eastern Marinade. The olives really make this dish. I had set aside half for Brian since he didn't like olives, and then I mixed in olives for the other half for myself. Side-by-side taste test found that you really need the olives. Without olives, it's not bad...but it's nothing special either. It tastes kind of like the salad toppings without the greens. But with the olives, it's quite interesting. Yummy. Brian even preferred them with the olives.

Several years ago, on one of her visits, my mom left me with a bag of fresh pea pod stems. "What am I supposed to do with this?" I wondered. She said it was very simple (everything in the kitchen is very simple to her it seems). "Just stir-fry some garlic, then the leaves and some salt. That's it!" I was doubtful since really I thought the joy is in the pea pods, not the stems. But I hate wasting food so I cooked it up and was surprised to find that it tasted really good. I forgot about it after that. The leaves had come from my mom's garden and I had assumed it was a dish that she came up with to make use of as much of the plant as possible. It didn't occur to me that I could get this at a restaurant.

Fast-forward several years and I'm browsing chowhound.com and noticing lots of posts extolling the tastiness of pea pod stems. So I went to a Chinese restaurant, saw it on the menu and was happy to find that yes, it was the same thing and they cooked it even better than my first attempt. More good news is on the way. It turns out that you can buy fresh pea pod stems in Asian grocery stores. Good thing...in the restaurant, the dish seems to range from $10-12. At the grocery store, the leaves were $5 per pound so a medium to big bag of it was about $3.50. Simple and quick to prepare. The tender leaves shrink down pretty quickly so be careful not to overcook them. After several attempts, I think I've finally got it down. The trickiest part for me was salting...I kept under-salting.

If you order it at a restaurant, ask for chao3 dou4 miao2 (I think that's how you write it in pinyin). It's pronounced kinda like 'chow dough meow'. Really yummy and good for you too!


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I've been trying to cook more vegetables and this snack alone makes it worth it to me to cook winter squash. I only wish I could find a store that still sold fresh pumpkins. We've fried up seeds from pumpkins, spaghetti squash, and butternut squash. All are tasty. All have far too few seeds.