No. No, I am not like you, pal. I guilt-tripped myself into eating kale a long time ago. It’s a superfood! It’s got vitamins and minerals through the roof, a ton of fiber, even calcium (I’m looking at you, vegans). Plus it has them little cancer fighting glucosinolates all in there. In the leaves. Y’know, glucosinolates? Point is, it’s amazingly good for you, but it ain’t no ordinary green. Unlike ice berg lettuce, kale won’t shamelessly whore itself out to any burger, taco or Chuck E. Cheese “side salad.” When raw, kale is tough and bitter and spiteful. It needs to know you respect it, you love it, you’ll even . . . massage it. A little salt, acidity and, yes a deep tissue massage, and you’ve got kale showing you its soft delicious side. Karen doesn't strike me as the type of person that is cool with pampering her food prior to eating it, so when she called me and insisted we make a kale and mango salad with dinner I was blown away. I figured she’d gotten all body-snatched by an alien that did really poor research. Turns out, Karen was ready to turn over a new LEAF. LEAF. Eh?
All right, so I didn't have much kale experience, but luckily for me the television in my household is almost exclusively tuned to The Food Network at all times, allowing me to be well acquainted with Guy Fieri shoveling food into his mouth in coronary proportions, Alton Brown being a total dick know-it-all and then cooking such amazing things that you forgive him almost immediately, and a little Indian food nymph know as Aarti Sequeira cooking up what I can only imagine are the most flavorful and delicious Indian dishes anyone has ever tasted. I don't know this for sure, but the judges sure seemed impressed on season 6 of The Next Food Network Star. Although the technology does not yet exist for me to confirm this assumption (Hello, Taste-O-Vision! Where are you? I'd like to eat some TV cheese now.) the judges' reactions were enough to make me jump at the idea of making Aarti's Massaged Kale Salad with mango and pepitas. Except that I had never really heard of pepitas but I did have a bag of frozen slivered almonds and as I'm sure Tony will rant about shortly, I am all about taking cooking shortcuts that will lead to food reaching my mouth sooner, even if it's only by a few seconds. So I went with almonds. So sue me.
OBJECTION! I'm now including a charge of libel in my lawsuit. Karen did not JUST go with almonds! She poured in a sorry heap of waxy still-frozen corpse nuts! I'm all for almonds in a salad, they've recently become one of my favorite additions, but they must always be toasted. It was one thing to shun pepitas, which are delicious and one of the funnest words ever, but raw almonds haven't nearly the machismo to compete with the flavors of any salad. Toasting them brings out a huge amount of rich nuttiness which is then a perfect compliment to many salads. Karen has become inured to my more fervent food convictions, so she ignored my roasting rant. I wouldn't be denied so easily. Shortly after sitting down to dinner I excused myself under the guise of getting something from the fridge. A few seconds later a "ding" alerted Karen to my devious plan.
"Dude, are you toasting almonds?"
"JUST TRY THEM!" And she did. Oh, if you could have seen the look on her face! I could actually see every stubborn muscle in her body beaten into submission by pure roasted truth! And you can too because I took a picture:
I suppose I should note that during this particular cooking adventure I was not in the best of health which may partly explain my laziness. I'd been fighting a fever, wicked cough, and sore throat for about a week and so my contribution to this meal consisted of me throwing together my kale salad, falling asleep on the couch, popping up and shouting, "DON'T TOAST THE ALMONDS!", falling asleep again, waking up and wandering into the kitchen, stirring whatever dish Tony was making (even though I later ate this dish, I still have little knowledge of what it actually was), and hanging around long enough to nitpick everything Tony did. I was sick and grumpy but wanted to get food made so I also contributed a half-assed plantain dish. My roommate had made some pretty great plantain chips earlier in the week (which I ate when I saw them sitting on the stove, because if you leave food sitting in plain site, I'ma eat it) and so I thought that I would try to duplicate her efforts. Tony suggested that we make something called "tostones" with the plantains which involved mashing and baking and garlic, to which I replied, "Ugh, let's just put oil on them and throw them in the ovenzzzzZZZZZ . . . . DON'T TOAST THE ALMONDS!"
Anyway, I succeeded in making some flavorless plantain nuggets with the consistency of cardboard. They can't all be winners.
It's true, Karen phoned it in this week, but I was happy to pick up the slack. Sending me out shopping alone, however, was not a good idea. I suffer from chronic indecisiveness, poor navigational skills and I can't go more than two hours without eating. Basically, I'm hard-wired to suck at shopping. Sending me to the store alone was tantamount to a parent pushing their blindfolded child into a knife warehouse with the directive to "Pick a sharp one. Oh, and have fun!" By the time I had been to three stores in search of shrimp, gotten lost and ended up starving to death in a cram packed Trader Joe's, I was stifling the severe urge to head butt everyone in line and trade the whole elaborate meal for In-N-Out and a beer. Luckily, I made it back to my car, ravenously devoured some broccoli and hummus and I was back on track. Glad I made it out alive because my Shrimp Creole turned out to be delicious! Although, due to an unfortunate shrimp shortage at Sprouts, the recipe became a "seafood medley creole." I used the Trader Joe's frozen shrimp, scallop and calamari combo, which is good, but some plump shrimp would have been better. They would have mamboed around the edge of the skillet playing steel drums before diving in synchronicity into the delicious stew and bidding me farewell with a hearty "Thanks for deh steam bath, mon!" Yikes. I apologize.
Looks ok, right? I was skeptical because it seemed too simple: onion, garlic, bell pepper, white wine, tomatoes, and cumin. Then you toss in your shrimp or perhaps aquatic medley or, hell, a thinly sliced dish towel. It doesn't matter, the flavor is that good! Not only that, but the rich semi sweetness of the coconut rice proved the perfect accompaniment to the smokey creole spice of the seafood.
Yeah, Tony done real good this week. Which is why I feel a little bit bad for sending him shopping alone, denying him his precious pepitas, and then belittling his vegetable chopping skills. The only other thing I contributed to this portion of the meal was to point out that, "Oh my god, this piece of onion is larger than the majority of the other onions! It's what statisticians would refer to as an 'outlier' and will therefore ruin the entire meal!!"
Luckily I followed this outburst by immediately passing out on the couch, allowing Tony to finish the meal unharangued. Whatever he did with the rice and seafood concoction turned out really well and even through my clogged nasal passages I could tell that it was delicious.
The kale salad was also tasty. Little Aarti did not disappoint, and at least my plantains looked pretty on the plate.
At this point I was nearly delirious with exhaustion and cantankerous as Grandpa Simpson, but we had to press on and do dessert. Remember those sweet potatoes I bought earlier? Well, I hadn't been able to squeeze them into the meal and so was determined to make them dessert. Sweet potato pie came to mind because it's a thing that most people have heard of, but making a pie seemed like a monumental task in my weakened state. So I did a quick search for pumpkin recipes (because pumpkin can be replaced with mashed sweet potatoes and be just as good . . . better even! Just you wait and see-uh who even cares. I just want to sleep.) My search revealed this recipe for Pumpkin Mousse Parfait that looked so pretty! It was settled, ingredients were assembled, dessert was gonna get made.
Pumpkin pie-spiced sweet potatoes, whipped cream and gingersnap cookies; it's like sweet potato pie in a cup! Well, sort of. I admit, I ate nearly my entire parfait because I had a raging sweet tooth and it was brimming with nutrient rich sweet potatoes (another superfood!), but it wasn't my cup of tea. I concealed my true thoughts from Karen because I suspected that, due to her sickness and the lackluster plantains, she might use a ginger snap shard to stab me. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't terrible, just a little too sweet for me and the inclusion of orange zest, the measurement of which Karen admittedly guessed at, was off-putting. I would try these again with pumpkin and less orange zest . . . and in a pie shell. Wow, they do look good, huh?
What these mediocre desserts made me realize is that we on this blog may be denying our true selves for the sake of interesting and aesthetically appealing desserts or "pansy ass desserts." I promise soon to make a real dessert consisting of no less than 3 pounds of chocolate and 12 sticks of butter because who are we kidding? Decadence is the best way to do dessert and I am clearly over my "not eating healthy enough" guilt trip. Sooooo over it.
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