When we think of Kale we think bland and boring, but you would be surprised at the dishes that you can create with this wonderful vegetable. Not only that but Kale has so many health benefits for you that you would be ignorant if you didn’t give this veg a try. For example, did you know that kale is less than 30 calories, and gives you a full daily quota of vitamin C? It also gives twice the daily amount of Vitamin A, but a staggering seven times the amount of Vitamin K! If that’s not enough the vegetable is jam-packed full of great nutrients that will give you everything you need and more.
Perhaps the biggest issue with kale is that people just don’t know how to cook it and what to do with it, right now we want to change all that and offer you some insights into what you can cook kale with in an effort to encourage you to go out to the local green grocers and grab yourself some of this wonderful super food.
Ok, so the first recipe we wanted to highlight is soup because kale happens to be the ideal ingredient for most type of healthy soups. Now soups can be as little as 250 calories but they taste great and fill you up a treat.
All you need is some carrots, onions, black beans, kale and then some olive oil, garlic, rosemary and a vegetable broth and you have yourself a fantastic lunchtime meal.
Of course, you can swap and mix the ingredients around if you wish by adding some celery or croutons or taking the black beans out and adding lentils. That’s the marvellous thing about soups, you can add practically anything to that broth and it will taste heavenly.
For just a little of 400 calories you can cook a braised kale dish that consists of sausage and a creamy polenta. This will tingle the taste buds of many health freaks and will even get the general food lover interested in giving it a try. All you need is some chicken sausage that you can cut up into sizeable chunks, some quick cook polenta, smoked paprika, some black pepper and salt, along with mascarpone cheese.
These ingredients cooked together and dished up ready to serve are quite the meal to be staring down on when hunger strikes.
Pasta goes with anything really, there isn’t much limit to what you can do with this food type and believe it or not there quite a few pasta dishes that are out there at the moment that will have you drooling from your lips when you see them.
One of those dishes happens to be Kale and Penne pasta with grated parmesan cheese. For this you want vegetable broth at hand and then a mixture of kale, penne pasta, olive oil, red peppers, crushed garlic and some salt and pepper. You will want to cut the kale up into small pieces and scatter it over the penne pasta, and then top it with the cheese.
This makes for an ideal lunchtime snack or a dinner, and its only 300 calories!
As well as adding kale to dishes such as soups and pasta it works a treat when added to meat and can even be a part of your Sunday dinners. Something along the lines of roasted pork chops, boiled kale and roasted butternut squash are hard to beat when you want something tasty as a dinner.
The kale will compliment both the meaty pork chops but will also work in harmony with that roasted butternut squash. Equally if you wanted to add more vegetables to the plate or replace the butternut squash with a creamy mash potato then this will work just as well.
Finally we come to a dish that contains more kale than other ingredients in a meal that consists of roasted peppers and olives. All you need to compliment this is a dash of balsamic vinegar across the top to add some tang. If you are feeling really adventurous you can experiment with different ingredients that go well with peppers and olives by adding some nuts or some feta cheese in a twist to the Greek salad.
Let the kale and the peppers cool down to enjoy this tasty dish cool or you can eat it as soon as it comes from the hob, the choice is yours.
This dish also happens to be one of the lowest calorie dishes we have mentioned in our recipe run down and comes in at just under 200 calories, so why not treat yourself to kale based dish and see how it suits you.