+ A quick and easy Cheesy Kale Crisps recipe 😋
As far a Superfoods go, Kale is right there up with the best of them. The good news is it’s cheap, easy to find fresh this time of year and you can do so much more than just boil the living daylights out of it!
Kale is one of the cruciferous family of vegetables that contain highly beneficial sulfuraphanes which possess anti-cancer properties. Other family members that also contain them include sprouts, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, rocket and mustard greens. It has a slightly hot, bitter flavour (responsible for a lot of people’s dislike of this set of veggies).
Kale is jam-packed with vitamins; eating just one cup of chopped kale gets you over 200% of your daily value of vitamin A, 134% of your daily value for vitamin C, and almost 700% of your daily value for vitamin K! In addition, kale contains important minerals like manganese, calcium, potassium, iron, zinc and copper. More surprisingly perhaps, this amazing green even contains good fats; about 120 mg of Omega-3 fatty acid per cup to be exact. You won't find that much in any other plant food.
Kale will also help with your skin, hair, teeth and nails due to its silica content, and eyes with astaxanthin and lutein, powerful carotenoids known to help prevent eye diseases such as macular degeneration and cataracts.
So as you can see, it really is worth trying to find a way of getting this super veg into your diet on a regular basis for it's numerous health giving properties.
Here's one of my favourite ways of eating Kale:
Ingredients:
Bunch of curly kale, leaves trimmed from the thick stalk. Supermarket bags of chopped Kale are not great for this as they seem to be full of stalk sometimes. If you are lucky enough to have a local grocer who buys and sells Kale unchopped, do opt for this.
2 tbsp Olive oil
2 tbsp Nutritional Yeast
1/2 tsp Freshly ground sea or rock salt
Variations:
Add 1/2 tsp Smoked Paprika
or
1/2 tsp Onion Powder
or
1/4 tsp Chilli flakes
Method:
Preheat oven to 150c
Simply wash and dry the kale then in a large bowl, rub in the oil and mix in the Nutritional Yeast and salt.
Spread the leaves out on a large baking tray or two. Allow some space inbetween the leaves, don't overcrowd the tray or the Kale will 'sweat' rather than bake.
Bake for about 20-30 minutes. Keep an eye on it towards the end to make sure it doesn't burn; this will negate all the health giving properties and it will become a carcinogen! See the top photo here, slightly brown but crisp is what you're aiming for.
Serve on its own as a snack, or it's really good crumbled and sprinkled over mashed sweet potato or added to salads.
Enjoy
