"kale" news and stories

Each Friday afternoon, I gather up an assortment of links from around the food webs for your pre-weekend enjoyment. Here's some of what's caught my eye recently.

1. Move over canning, root cellars are the newest (oldest), hottest method of food preserving on the block. The New York Times featured them last week and Culinate offers more on subject from expert Harriet Fasenfest.
2. Looking for a way to make your winter a little brighter? Plan meals with friends and family.
3. Like the taste and convenience of slow cooked foods but don't have an electric slow cooker? CityMama helps you use just a cast iron casserole dish and your oven to achieve the same effect.
4. The Wednesday Chef featured a chocolate chip cookie recipe that includes buckwheat groats for added fiber and texture. These are going on my 'must make' list for this weekend.
5. I bought a big bunch of kale last weekend at the farmers market. I haven't gotten around to cooking it yet, but I've got my eye on this recipe from Elise at Simply Recipes.
6. For those of you out there who keep kosher, it's going to be a whole lot harder to get kosher beef for you dining table. NPR reports that one of the largest Kosher meat plants in the country has shut down their beef facility.
7. I like pumpkin bread and I LOVE cranberry bread. Putting the two of them together? Genius!
8. Looking for a weekend baking project that will knock the socks straight off your loved ones? What about the Feather Boa Doughnuts that Erin made recently! Based on a recipe from 101 Cookbooks, they are a little lighter than fried doughnuts but I imagine no less delicious.

Who ever said Easter feasts required big, slow-roasted birds? The creative folks behind What the hell does a vegan eat, anyway? featured a gorgeous seitan roulade for their holiday entree.

Like good vegans, they made their own seitan, the old-fashioned way - no store-bought stuff for them! If you're feeling ambitious (and have some time on your hands), the seitan recipe is here.

After making and rolling out the seitan, it was filled with mushrooms and kale, rolled up, and baked for 25 minutes at 350 degrees F. The best part? Instead of twine, they used these cute reusable silicone ties to secure the roulade while it baked. They added some mushroom gravy at the end, which looked great, but I'm sure it tastes delicious plain, as well. Although if you're not gonna eat gravy with Easter dinner, when are you gonna eat gravy? Just sayin', is all.

My dream is that these lovely people will welcome me into their home and adopt me and offer to cook for me every night. But until that happens, I'll just keep featuring their awesome recipes.

You want Irish food? You got it.

Jeannette, a Slashfood Flickr user - who also happens to write a fantastic blog, Everybody likes Sandwiches - shared her recipe for colcannon, traditional Irish comfort food made of cabbage or kale, mashed potatoes, and a healthy dose of butter or cream. Jeannette added leeks to hers (onions or chives are often added, as well).

Colcannon can be eaten anytime, obviously, but it's typically enjoyed around Halloween, and some families hide charms or coins in the mixture. The idea is that whomever finds it has luck for the coming year. There's actually an adorable scene that illustrates this concept in In America, a film about an Irish family who immigrates to America.

Check out Jeannette's recipe here.

• Start your year with comfort foods.
• Whole wheat pasta is everywhere.
• Mmmmmm ... fat!
• More and more people are using the web to lose weight.
• The greens of winter.
• A woman's hobby of making dips and spreads becomes a full-time career.
• Make your own donuts.
• This week's recipes: Kale and White Bean Soup with Chicken Sausage, Swiss Chard with Cannellini Beans and Tomatoes, and Beet Borscht.

Earlier this week I discovered something new about my mother. My blogging for Slashfood has had an unintended, but positive, consequence in her life. It has opened her up to the world of recipes on the internet and now she's off and running. Several days ago, she punched in a short list of ingredients into Google, looking for a little inspiration. She found herself on Chez Megane and proceeded to make Megane's Vegetable Soup...With Meatballs.

She walked me through the changes she made to the recipe, which included doubling the amount of kale, punching up the broth with a shot of Bragg's Liquid Aminos and used ground turkey for the meatballs. Whether you make it just as it was written or adopt some of my mom's changes, it sounds like a tasty and easy soup, perfect for these chilly, dark evenings.

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