Pesto, Kale, and Mushroom Spaghetti Squash

Italian Style Spaghetti Squash

Recipe Adapted from Allrecipes.com

It’s spring! Though spring officially arrives today, it will be a month or more before we start seeing local spring veggies. In the meantime, using up last year’s harvest of winter squash is prudent, but boring. But with just a little bit of cheating—making a winter pesto with imported basil leaves or buying premade pesto at the market—last year’s spaghetti squash is elevated to Italianesque loveliness. Combined with in-season kale, onions, and mushrooms, plus a dose of Parmesan, garlic, and red pepper, this spaghetti squash awakens even the most jaded of winter palates.

Asian Kale Salad with Strawberries and Apricots

Fiesta of Color and Flavor

Recipe by Robin

Kale is trending, plus we get some every week in our CSA share lately. I must confess it is not our favorite vegetable. We’ve tried all the usual recipes: ginger garlic kale, Portuguese soup, bean & bacon soup, Italian braised kale, and massaged kale salad.  We’ve created some more unusual dishes: shrimp braised with kale and carrot, mushroom, and kale stir-fry. With kale’s popularity these days, I asked myself, what have I never seen done with it? Kale with fruit came immediately to mind, possibly inspired by early ripe apricots on my counter. And so, I was off to explore the non-intuitive combination of tough, cruciferous kale with sweet, squishy fruits.

Italian Style Braised Kale

Colorful and Flavorful Fun

Recipe by Robin

Versatile home cooks know that spinoffs are not just for sitcoms. Recipe spinoffs, aka tweaks, allow us to substitute on-hand ingredients while adding variety to our favorite dishes. This kale recipe is a spinoff from Simply Braised Greens, a summer recipe of mizuna, bok choy, and spinach flavored with garlic, onion, red bell pepper, and thyme. The spinoff employs springtime kale, green garlic, and leeks, dried tomatoes from last year’s garden, and oregano. These few ingredient switcheroos create a new dish: same method, but new and different flavor and texture.

Massaged Kale Salad with Sunflower Seeds

A Little Dressing & a Lot of Kale

Recipe by Robin

Raw kale is a nutritional powerhouse, but its sharp taste and unyielding texture make eating it a more healthful than delicious experience. However, the commercial solution of drowning the kale in an oily dressing to tone it down can reduce flavor and texture to a bland, soppy mess. Luckily, home cooks can achieve better results by massaging the kale by hand. Fear not, you won’t need extraordinary upper body strength! Most of the work is done chemically by lemon juice while you squeeze for just 2 minutes. Further mellowing of the kale is accomplished by marinating in an easy dressing.

Vegan Couvres: Portuguese Kale Soup with Fresh Beans

Portuguese Kale Soup with a Difference (Soyrizo)

Recipe by Robin

Hot soup is the perfect cold weather food, warming up both body and spirit as we slide towards the shortest day of the year. With plenty of winter kale and potatoes around, I was inspired by a recipe for couvres, a type of Portuguese kale soup, from the 1972 community cookbook Cooking and Traveling the Cape Cod Way. Instead of the standard Portuguese sausage chourizo, I chose to use vegan Soyrizo, which acts quite differently than sausage in soup.  Luckily, this difference helps reduce the cooking time from almost 3 hours to less than 1. Using fresh cannellini beans (or precooked or canned ones) also helps trim the time.

Autumn Minestrone

Autumn Colors and Flavors

Recipe Inspired by The Art of Simple Food

One of my favorite things about autumn is a steady supply of fresh butternut squash. Complimenting both savory and sweet dishes, often used in “pumpkin” pies, a sweet treat simply steamed with a touch of butter, it’s the quintessential fall vegetable. So when Alice Waters suggested, in her classic book The Art of Simple Food, to try butternut in place of zucchini to make a summery minestrone into a fall dish, I had to give it a whirl. Indeed, the soup is a delightfully autumn-like orange, and as full of chunky goodies as its warmer weather brethren.

Bacon and Bean Soup with Kale

Last Two Serving of Soup

Recipe by Robin

Kale is just not something that my husband favors. In recent weeks of giant kale bunches we’ve explored Garlic Ginger Kale, Green Garlic Kale with Leeks, and our classic Hot Kale Salad with Balsamic & Hot Chili Oil. He’s tired of all of them, and tired of any side dish that is essentially just plain kale with seasonings. We had the same issue last year with large amounts of hefty escarole. Finally I drowned the escarole in a soup with beans and bacon, two well-known man-pleasers. This takeoff on Escarole, White Bean, and Bacon Soup suits this window of time while we still waiting on tomato harvests, but have plenty of mild and spicy peppers. Quite a bit of kale can be submerged in this recipe, and its hearty flavor compliments the bacon, peppers, and beans.

Shrimp Braised with Kale and Green Garlic

US White Shrimp: Large and Reasonably Sustainable

Recipe Adapted from Recipes from the Root Cellar

I love shrimp and have noticed that readers do too. However, in years past it’s not been easy to find sustainably produced shrimp. Old school fisheries involve dragging a net along the bottom of the ocean, with a huge amount of bycatch: about 4 lbs. for every 1 lb. of shrimp caught. Many shrimp farms are open to the ocean, leaching antibiotics, commercial fish food, and shrimp waste into the environment. Some shrimp farmers destroy native mangrove ecosystems to build farms. Luckily, the Monterey Bay Aquarium publishes sustainable shrimp guidelines, and they are getting easier to follow. Trending now are hook-and-line caught shrimp and closed-system farms. The rebuilding of the US Gulf of Mexico fisheries after Hurricane Katrina and the pioneering of closed-system farming enterprises in Thailand and Vietnam are both great news for shrimp eaters. And if I’m reading the guidelines right, we can now buy sustainable shrimp at Costco for under $10 per pound.

Bruce's Mushroom Kale Carrot Stir Fry

Kale, Mushrooms, and Carrots: Help Yourself to Health

Recipe by Bruce

Don’t you love it when (1) another family member cooks dinner, (2) they use up all the odd leftover veggies in the fridge, (3) what they cook turns out amazing, and (4) you have a pen, paper, and foresight to write down what they did so they can recreate their masterpiece again and again. Kudos to hubby Bruce for creating this recipe a few years back, using ingredients that we had on hand. Not only is it delicious, but also nearly every ingredient promotes health and builds the immune system with vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, and antioxidants. Kale is high in vitamins A, B-complex, C, and K, as well as various flavonoids with antioxidant properties. Carrots have lots of vitamin A and several minerals. Mushrooms, ginger, and garlic are all nutritional superstars. The dish is colorful and low in fat. There is simply no downside to this recipe.

Winter Greens Soup for Immune Boost

Colorful, Nutritious, and Most Especially Yummy

Recipe from Field of Greens

Looking for ways to strengthen your immune system? Good idea for staying well at this time of year. According to WebMD,  “A diet rich in antioxidant vitamins and nutrients can boost immunity. Top antioxidants include vitamins C and E, plus beta-carotene and zinc.” Their top antioxidant food picks include kale, onions, spinach, carrots, chard, and garlic. And that’s pretty much the ingredient list for this soup. So it’s healthy, but the real surprise is its savory deliciousness, considering its simple ingredients. Preparation method is key. As my friend Gwen, who makes this soup every winter says, “If you throw it all into a pot, it won't come out right. Follow instructions, then it's delicious!” Luckily, the instructions are pretty easy.

Green Garlic Kale with Leeks

Greens and More Greens

Recipe by Robin

I have a love-hate relationship with green garlic. I love the novelty of the first green garlic in spring, its mellow flavor both green-ish and garlicky, and how we can slice up the whole thing without separating it into cloves. I love celebrating the green garlic season, before garlic dries into its more familiar form. My problem? Too much green garlic! During the season we get a bunch every week from our CSA, and as time goes by the bulbs get bigger, which means increasing weekly quantity.  After the usual Pasta a l’Olio, Red Pasta Sauces, and Stir Fries, I run out of green garlic ideas.

Garlic Ginger Kale

Get Your Antioxidants and Immunity Here

Recipe inspired by James, Live Earth Farm & Weight Watchers

Has there ever been a more perfect pairing of ingredients than garlic and ginger? Equally strong, pungent, and aromatic, they’re a classic combination in Chinese restaurant dishes throughout America. Both garlic and ginger are considered “warming” in traditional Chinese medicine. Both are used to treat stomach and digestive problems as well as dysfunctions of the lung system, which includes the nasal passages and the immune system. Combining them in a recipe sounds like the beginning of a winter tonic.

Hot Kale Salad with Balsamic & Hot Chili Oil

Delicious and Nutritious Kale

Recipe Inspired by Live Earth Farm

Another recipe inspired by Debbie, LEF’s CSA coordinator and kitchen wizard. Most likely I created it when we wanted to make her original recipe but were out of lemon and parmesan. We substituted balsamic vinegar and a touch of hot oil. Debbie tried our recipe and didn’t have hot oil, so substituted hot chili sauce, and reported delicious results! Feel free to come up with variations of your own, and post them as a comment if you create something you like!