Kale Chips: More Powerful than Potato Chips

I've always had a fondness for kale. It's big and green and curly-leafed. It's often less expensive than other leafy greens. When someone tells you to "eat your greens," I don't think of slippery spinach, I think of collards and kale. They're hearty and they mean business.

And recently, my friends at CookingLight.com told me they’ve seen a spike in kale recipe requests on their web site.

Kale, quite possibly, is cool.

But nothing tests the coolness of kale like a roomful of 5-year olds. If I could get these little angels, with their sensitive palates turned toward sweet, to try, but more importantly enjoy kale, dark green and so darn healthy looking, then I’d know we were in the midst of a revolution.

Last week, I visited Andrea Mayernik’s first grade class in the Richard E. Byrd School in Glen Ridge. I have a dear, dear friend who is a student in the class, and she recently brought my cookbook to class as an example of a how-to book. I was tickled when I heard the news, and offered to visit the class and show the students how to write a recipe.

We started by making a simple fruit salad, and learned how important it was to give clear direction. For example, adding a banana or a clementine to a fruit salad isn’t very useful; you have to be sure to tell the person following your recipe to peel them first. And when cutting a banana into pieces, what size pieces work best? Bite-size or just big honkin’ chunks?

You get the drift. 36 students made delicious fruit salad that day, and wrote the recipes to prove it.

Back to my five-year-old friend. I knew she was a friend of kale, because when I held a book signing at Ridgewood’s Bookends earlier this year, I brought a big bowl of kale chips to the signing, as an example of the kind of recipes in the cookbook.

My short friend reached her hand into the bowl many many times, which made me smile, but concerned her mother who finally cut her off. The only way to console the child that she could have kale again was for mama to purchase the cookbook, and promise that she’s make kale chips at home.

And now, almost a year later, the child asks for kale on a regular basis. If she gets to choose one thing at the grocery store, it’s not ice cream or potato chips; it’s kale chips. A kale chip uses a little kitchen magic — the gentle, dry heat of your oven — to transform a soft leaf to a crisp leaf, only enhanced by some olive oil and salt. The texture of potato chip minus a deep frier, something you have to taste to truly understand.

I had to know if this was one particularly unusual child, or if kale chips, in their homemade form, were universally appealing to 5-year-olds.

And so while I was at the Byrd school, after we all enjoyed a small plate of fruit salad, I served the homemade kale chips, made by the mother of the kale-loving child. As we walked around the room, some kids responded with a frown to the green leaf placed on their plate, but as soon as they had a bite, the hands shot up. "More Kale, please!" We served those chips until five heads of kale were gone; the children loved them.

And then, to my delight, the children asked if they could have the recipe so their parents could make the kale chips at home. I have to wonder how the parents responded when their children insisted that they make kale. I would not believe it had I not witnessed it myself.

Kale, officially, is cool.

Allison Fishman is the host of Yahoo’s Blue Ribbon Hunter and author of You Can Trust A Skinny Cook. For delicious humor & recipes, visit allisonfishman.com or follow @allisonfishman on Twitter.

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