Looks Gross, Tastes Amazing: Red Kale Soup

A lot of people get turned off by all this green, but there's no food colouring involved, no grass, no bitter, gross vegetables or a bad texture. It's one nutrient-rich, SWEET soup thanks to miraculous kale. Even the red variety ends up green (it's only called red kale because of the red lines in the veins, which you don't see once it's cooked/puréed anyway. I bought it because it looked a little fresher than the green this week at the market). Probably more people would find this soup attractive if it were actually red. That's what I call racist. Well, that and a few other things.

Kale is not chard. There is nothing swiss about it. That's a very important distinction. Chard looks a bit more like lettuce, and it's tough and bitter. Kale is sweet and smooth. Actually the white part is the tastiest. It may have the visual appeal of iceberg lettuce, but it actually tends a lot more toward the flavour of a good bok choy or spinach. Unlike any of the choy family (pak choy, bok choy, etc.) you wouldn't want to smother its bland form in hoisin sauce because it's better on its own. Buy organic and then call me a vegetable genius. So I usually just boil or steam a few long stalks for a side dish, the same as spinach (kale actually holds up better than spinach to cooking anyway. First boil the white stalks for a minute and then boil the leaves for another minute. Or just turn off the heat when you add the leaves and let the pot sit covered to wilt the greens. You kill fewer nutrients this way, but the leaves still soften).

The foundation of a good soup is a good broth. If you don't have any home-made, that's completely okay! Just buy good stuff. Definitely go organic and definitely make sure there's no MSG (monosodium glutamate - a flavour enhancer that's mostly sodium...but worse), corn syrup (candy does not belong in green soup), or things you can't pronounce in the ingredient list. Even some organic ones have yeast in them, so be careful of anything you don't think should really belong in soup, using the guiding principle that home-made broth is just vegetables, recognizable spices, and maybe chicken, beef or fish.

Anyway, the reason this soup was so good was because I defrosted a large yogurt container of home-made shrimp broth leftover from making my seasonal spot prawn stir-fry as the base. All you do is take the shells of however many prawns you shucked, put them in a large pot, cover them with water and bring the water to a simmer (not a boil) for 15 minutes. Then strain off the shells. Voila, stock! Even after making this soup I have 3L of delicious broth leftover in my freezer. That's 2 or 3 more whole pots of soup right there!

Maybe you're not as excited about that as me, but with a soup recipe with only two ingredients that actually tastes good, the potential to make more delicious soup is a cause for celebration.

Ingredients:
About 5 cups broth (home-made or organic fish, chicken, or vegetable. Cubes or powder are fine. OXO is not)
1 package red kale (or green)

1. Bring broth to a boil in a large pot (defrost frozen broth and bring to boil).
2. Tear off leaves of kale and set aside. Add white parts of kale leaves to boiling broth, reduce heat to medium-low, cover, and simmer for 2 minutes.
3. Add kale leaves. Simmer 1 minute.
4. Purée soup in batches in a blender. Return to pot to serve and let the rest cool.

Grand total work time is about 8 minutes if your stove takes awhile to bring things to a boil (add an extra few minutes to defrost frozen broth). The fun part of this is knowing how much kale you're happily eating. You put all this kale in the pot and then once it's puréed you can easily eat half a pot of soup. You probably wouldn't eat the equivalent half a bag of kale if it was just boiled. Well you would if you're me, but I'm an oddity, I know.

Seasonal Cooking: Spring Spot Prawns with Fiddleheads and Peas

The Atwater Market and Jean Talon have exploded. That means it's Spring. When the flower vendors come in and the fresh fruit and vegetable sections expand to four times their normal size I get really excited. The downside of the new consumer obsession with eating locally and seasonally is that whatever's in season tends to be really expensive when it first hits the market. That's why I avoided buying fiddleheads. They went from an item nobody wanted, and nobody certainly knew how to cook, to a highly prized delicacy. Like wild leeks. Wild leek pesto seems so generic to me now. Soon Martha Stewart will be carrying a line of it, I'm sure.

I meant to wait until the end of each vegetable's season to buy it, so that the prices would reduce, but I caved. This last week I saw fiddleheads at the market and after comparison shopping a few different places, I bought them from Michaca Farms at a decent $5 a bag. I think it was asparagus' fault, since I'd avoided buying those until I found them VERY reasonably priced at the McGill Organic Campus tent on rue McTavish north of Sherbrooke on Tuesday last week. When I tasted them, and compared them to the organic ones I'd actually found fairly reasonably priced at Jean-Talon, I remembered how beautiful it was to eat in Spring. They were sweet and mild and you didn't even need to crack off the bottoms they were so fresh. Once I had fresh Spring produce, I needed more, and that meant fiddleheads.

I planned to make them very simply, using a basic Indian spicing of asafetida, onions, mustard seeds, garlic and cayenne, and salt, but I forgot I'd also bought some pois mange-tout (the kind of peas you where you can eat the whole pea...what's the word in English? It's not sugar-snap), and then I'd seen some sept-iles (local Quebec) spot prawns on for incredibly cheap (less than $6 a pound) and tried to buy a pound but the man gave me 2. That was fine...

The plan was to make quasi-sushi with them since I had leftover sushi rice, but in the end the photo above is what happened: Indian-Spiced Prawns with Fiddleheads and Peas. Somewhere between a shrimp stir-fry and an Indian shrimp saag (since the spicing originally came from a saag recipe) the dish was so, so good, and good for me. The only annoying part was shelling the prawns. You don't get a whole lot of meat off one of those guys, but you get tons of shells for making shrimp stock!!! I now have 4L of stock in my freezer waiting for my next soup or sauce. I love Spring. Did I mention that?

Fiddleheads need to be cooked twice. If you eat them raw they're toxic. So blanch them first and then cook them however you want (boil, steam, blanch again, stir-fry, grill, etc). So I threw them in boiling water for 3 minutes and then drained them and rinsed them under cold water. They have a lot of loose green threads that kind of fall off. It looks like they're pretty dirty, but it's just threads falling everywhere. Give them a good rinse before and after blanching and they'll be fine.

Then stir-fry. I heated a bit of oil (you can use anywhere from a teaspoon to 3 tablespoons. If you use more you won't need to be as diligent about stirring or adding water to keep it from burning, but you up the fat a lot) on high heat (this is a high-heat stir-fry, not medium-high, or medium, so be careful not to use olive oil or another oil that burns).

When the oil got hot in my large pot, I added the grated asafetida and then the mustard seeds "a few seconds later". When they started to pop (another "few seconds"...oh, Madhur Jaffrey) I added the onion that I had sliced finely and some minced garlic.

Stir, stir stir. The onions were going to burn a little, so I added a tiny bit of water to keep that from happening. They get soft this way, not crispy but I still like the flavour. It's more important to cook them through than to undercook them by not adding more liquid. 2 minutes later I added the fiddleheads and peas, and two minutes after that I added a pinch of cayenne, 1/2 cup of water, 1/4 tsp salt, and my spot prawns. They don't need much time at all; 2 minutes, max. If they're over-cooked they taste like rubber. What I didn't realize was that they're salt water prawns, so I didn't need to add any salt to the recipe. Still, the extra didn't make the dish less delicious. Madhur Jaffrey's recipes are often heavy on salt and cutting out a little (except in the lentil and bean dishes) is usually fine.

The picture isn't amazing, I know, and I think the peas were on the end of their shelf life. I'd been saving them for too long probably. That's the thing about fresh, good food - it doesn't last. You need to eat it right away. No holding back or delayed gratification. The food necessitates immediate satisfaction. Long live Spring, though I know, like the produce, it won't, and I will just have to take advantage of it while I can.