One of my favorite games is hiding healthy superfoods inside ridiculously unhealthy packages. Then I eat the whole thing with reckless abandon all the while pretending that it's 100% good for me. This sort of self-delusion is pervasive and stubborn and applies to most things I like putting in my face. Blueberry pie? Healthy. Got blueberries in it. Banana bread? Healthy. Bananas. Potassium. Even the gooiest, most sugary chocolate cake has got eggs in it, and eggs are good for you, especially if you buy the Omega-3 enriched kind. It's not a diabetes bomb, it's an Omega-3 cake. Healthy.
But some superfoods are tricky to sneak in to palatable menu items. The one I've been struggling with the longest is kale. I want to like it so badly. It's a dark, leafy green packed to the brim with nutrients and all sorts of things that keep me alive. It even looks cool, all bunched up in wrinkly clusters. It's the most structurally integral green, making spinach and chard look like weak, floppy has-beens. But that taste--that taste is so darn strong.
And not good-strong, like garlic or romaine. It's oddly bitter. As far as the greens family goes, kale is that awkward cousin that hangs around its more socially competent relatives but never quite gets their jokes. It can't compete with the delicate sweetness of bok-choy or the easy salad compatibility of baby spinach. I've tried cooking it, I've tried blending it into smoothies, I've tried making chips out of it. It never quite loses that hard, scraping bite that makes it stand out from all its surrounding flavors.
But I wanted to eat it somehow, if just to prove that I could. And so while scouring my nearly barren fridge after a week-long vacation, I came up with a plot not only to use up the odd items I had left over, but to make kale delicious. Thus a devious scheme arose: I was going to make kale wontons, dammit.
I was inspired in no small part by the abundance of wonton wrappers I had lying in the back of my fridge. There was a 2-for-1 special at Jewel when we were making salmon wontons and we got carried away. With possibly hundreds of leftover wrappers, I had to do something to ensure my bargain purchase did not go to waste. And so I embarked upon frying kale into something so crispy and delicious I would never even recognize it.
Not by itself, of course. Wontons filled purely with kale would be a little ick. What I did was this: I sauteed the green in a little oil to soften it, then shredded it to oblivion. No more stiff veiny architecture, just an oily green pulp. I then mashed it in a bowl with some room-temperature cream cheese--also leftover from our previous wonton adventures. In a perfect world, I probably would have used goat cheese, but I was in scrounge mode. I gave it a splash of lemon and a little salt and I had my filling. I spooned it into wrappers, folded them over, and pan-fried them in some olive oil (which in retrospect was too heavy for frying--I'd use coconut or soybean oil next time). The result? Not bad at all. Granted, I started with some fairly mild kale, but I do think even its typically obnoxious flavor would do nicely fried to a crisp alongside some chevre. I'd improve my ingredients if I were to redo the recipe for real and not just as a fridge emptying technique, but for a foray into undocumented recipe territory, I'd say it was pretty damn tasty.