Scavenge Lord, What Do We Do With All This Kale?
Channel: Scott Gastineau
Date: 2016-04-21

While scavenging one winter morning, I found a huuuuge bag of fresh kale which being thrown away. Kale is a great health food for you if you can force yourself to eat it. Kale tastes like aspirin in a baking soda glaze.

I brought the bag home and began experimenting with different ways to eat the kale. Not being a fussy eater, I did simply clean a few leaves and eat them as nature intended. I decided to challenge myself to find a better way. I tried stuffing it, blending it into smoothies, mixing it with other smoothies, and making salads. None of those uses were satisfying.
The best use I have found of kale is grilling it.

Preheat your grill. I use a small George Foreman grill which works very well for these purposes because it drains and catches the excess oil.

Wash your hands. Then thoroughly wash the kale. Then wash your hands again just to make certain that nothing bad was transferred from the raw veggies to your hands. Tear the central stem (the heart) out of the kale leaves so that they will lay flat on your grill. Those hearts can still be used in your mediocre kale smoothies.

Then place it on a paper plate and pour olive oil. Spread that oil over both sides. You don't need a lot.

Now flavor the kale as you prefer. It doesn't actually need any additional flavors, but I am a big fan of black pepper. I also added a very small amount of celery salt.

Then grill the leaves on the grill one or two at a time. Cook them until they turn entirely brown or even black in spots. Overcooking is much preferred to undercooking here. It takes me about ten minutes to get the effect that I want. If you have a spouse with a sensitive nose (like my wife), you may want to do this while she is out of the house. The kitchen will have strong cooked veggies smell similar to boiled broccoli for about an hour after cooking.

After grilling, these leaves are ready to eat. They have the texture of a thin potato chip and smell like those bags of veggie chips you keep passing up at the vending machine. They taste like – well, they taste like nothing. The pepper, salt, and olive oil flavors still come through, but the kale itself has basically been rendered tasteless. That lack of flavor after all is the entire point.

It is as if the excess oil in the drip pan carried the flavor away with it. The olive oil came in like a long boat full of viking raiders, plundered the village of Kale Leaf, and escaped with sacks full of kale flavor. The villagers thankfully waved goodbye and called to the departing longboats that they looked forward to next year's raiding.

The featured music track in this video is "Supreme" by John Deley and the 41 Players. This smooth groove comes to us straight out of the Youtube Ad Free Music Library.