Kitchen Misadventures: Kale, Beets, Fava Beans and Parsley, What the Heck Do I Do With All This?

With only a few days to go until the next CSA delivery and lots of produce left to use, I spent an evening early this week almost entirely in the kitchen. On the menu: kale chips, roasted beets, and fava beans.

I prepped the kale much like the chard, wash, dry, rip from stem, tear into small pieces. Instead of sautéing them though, I drizzled olive oil over them and then sprinkled on some seasoned salt. 350 degrees, 15 minutes, moved on to other things while that cooked.

Fava beans, it turns out, take a lot of preparation! First you have to get them out of the pods, which takes a few minutes. Then you have to boil them for a while, say 5-10 minutes. Have some ice water in a bowl nearby and when removing from the boiling water, put them immediately into the ice water and let them sit long enough to become sufficiently chilled. Take them out and, one by one,  you'll have to peel off the whitish layer to reveal a the bright green bean inside. If you're anything like me, at that point in the prep you're thinking, "These things better be good!" Um, that remains to be seen.

Once the beans were all ready to be cooked, I heated a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a skillet and threw them in. Add salt and pepper, mix to coat evenly with the oil, and let them sit for a bit. After a few minutes I went back and squished a couple of the fava beans and mixed them up again to make a little thicker "sauce." So far so good, but I think this is where I went wrong. I had looked at a tutorial on YouTube for preparation instructions and it mentioned that adding a little chicken broth for flavor would help. I didn't have actual broth ready to go, so I cut a bit off of a bouillon cube and put it in with a little water, mixing it up. It looked legit, but in the end my fava beans tasted like...chicken broth. Next time, I'll skip that part and maybe figure out what fava beans actually taste like.

Back to the kale, oh no, it burned! Yeah, and burned kale doesn't smell great friends, so be careful of that (though frankly not-burned kale doesn't smell fab either). Also in this round I very clearly put too much seasoned salt on. I threw that batch away (outside) and fixed up another two cookie sheets worth to put in the oven, going easier on the seasoned salt this time around. I also only put them on for 10 minutes this time. Success! My kale chips actually tasted pretty good. In fact, if they weren't so darned stinky I might make that again. As it is, I probably won't be making these again anytime soon, but if you like kale I recommend.

This left me with beets and parsley left to use. Why not combine them? Nope, only kidding, that would be gross! Beets at least I was familiar with, but only in their salad bar form. I was surprised to discover that their texture is similar to a potato when raw. I washed them, cut the stems and roots off, peeled them, sliced them up like a would a potato (thick slices, kind of uneven, ya know, like a little kid would do, because that's my level of cooking technique), and put them in a sheet to roast in my little toaster oven on 350 degrees for an hour. Why the toaster oven you ask? Because it's more reliable than the antique oven in my kitchen. No really, it's an antique oven from the 50's. Very cute, but not particularly accurate in temperature and it always, without fail, sets off my smoke detector. Every. Time.

Anyway, I digress. The beets came out beautifully and were just like I expected! Success! That leaves the parsley. I still haven't figured out what to do with that, so I washed it, dried it, chopped it all up, and put it in a baggy to freeze. I'll figure that one out later.

So, for the record, that's CSA kale, beets, fava beans and parsley (sort of), check!

Stay tuned, because CSA Part 2 happened today!