Recipes of the Month: Three kinds of greens

I had a bit of a dilemma deciding what to post as my Vegan Recipe of the Month for January. I've tried three new veggie-focused dishes this month, but one wasn't quite vegan and the others weren't really  recipes. So I decided to cover them all and figure they add up to one new vegan recipe among them.

The first dish we tried was the Garlicky Cannellini Beans with Wilted Kale and Eggs from the latest Savory magazine (a freebie from Stop & Shop). You can find the full recipe here, but the short version is that you mash up the beans a bit, add them to an ovenproof pan with garlic and red pepper, then add chopped kale bit by bit and let it wilt. When you've got a whole pound in there, you make six little wells in the mixture, crack an egg into each one, and pop the pan in the oven until the eggs are set.

Brian made a couple of modifications to this recipe. He didn't think our biggest pan would accommodate a whole pound of kale, so he used just 12 ounces of it and four eggs while keeping the amount of beans the same. This made the dish heartier and more protein-heavy, which was all to the good as far as we were concerned. He also beat the eggs lightly before adding them to the pan, since neither of us cares that much for egg yolk in its elemental form. The recipe said to serve the dish with dinner rolls, but we just cut a couple of slices of his hearty brown bread to complete the meal.

This was much better than we expected it to be. Neither of us is a huge fan of kale, but in this form, mixed up with the eggs and beans and garlic, it had plenty of flavor. And with the brown bread, it actually made a satisfying meal for the two of us and left a little bit over for a lunch the next day. So now, next time we see a great deal on kale, we'll know something to do with it.

The next dish we tried wasn't really a recipe, just a new twist on our old Savory Cabbage with Vegan Sausage. This, in turn, was an attempt to come up with a substitute for the free-range kielbasa we used to buy at the Amish market using Soy Curls. It works pretty well, but when we came across some Tofurky Polish-style sausage at Lidl the other day, I thought we should try that in the same dish and see how it was. We'd previously tried eating it plain and found it a bit too dry, but I suspected that in a moist dish like this it might work better.

Sure enough, this proved to be the case. Brian cut the sausage links into rounds and fried them in the Dutch oven by themselves, then added the veggies and cooked them until everything was tender. The vegan sausages didn't contribute their own juices to the mixture the way pork sausages would, but they did provide a nice contrast in both flavor and texture. Brian admitted that they might even work a little better in this dish than his own Soy Curl alternative, particularly the few pieces that had been cooked more thoroughly than the rest and were just a bit charred. The slight torching brought out a smokiness that the Liquid Smoke in the Soy Curls couldn't quite match.

However, while the Tofurky sausages were a little better than the homemade version, they probably weren't so much better as to justify the price tag. At $5.58 per pound ($4.89 for a 14-ounce package), they were cheaper than most vegan sausages we've found, and even a bit cheaper than the sausages from the Amish market. But they're still quite a bit pricier than the Soy Curl version, and honestly, not that much better. With just a bit (okay, a lot) of salt, garlic, and smoke flavoring, you can get Soy Curls more than 90 percent of the way to tasting like real kielbasa.

The final dish was the simplest, but probably the biggest success of the lot. To use up the rest of the bag of kale we bought for the bean recipe, Brian decided to try making his own kale chips. He just washed the kale, rubbed it with olive oil, sprinkled on some salt, spread it out on a baking sheet, and baked it for 10 minutes at 450. This succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. Just like our favorite roasted Brussels sprouts, the baked kale was satisfyingly crunchy, with just enough salt and fat to be tasty and not so much as to make us feel gross eating it. And there wasn't a hint of the bitterness we normally associate with this veggie. Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of it, because we scarfed it down too fast.

Of the three new ways to prepare greens we tried, I think this one is most likely to become a regular addition to our repertoire. In fact, Brian liked it so much that he already bought another bag of kale just so he could try it again, but in his efforts to get it just a little bit crispier, he ended up turning it into biochar. So we've determined that the baking time needs to be closer to 10 minutes than 15 to keep the kale in the sweet spot between limp and burnt. Fortunately, there's more kale left in the bag, so we can try it again and get the timing pinned down.

If the next batch is as good as the first, I think this might make an ideal healthy afternoon snack for Passover. For me, the hardest thing about getting through eight grain-free days is going without my usual afternoon bowl of popcorn. The last couple of years, I've been buying packaged seaweed snacks, but they're not as satisfying, and they're pricey and and overpackaged to boot. These homemade kale chips are cheaper, more substantial, and much lower on packaging, and they're not even that much more work to make than the popcorn. They take a bit longer, but I think they'll be worth the wait. And honestly, who ever felt guilty about pigging out on kale?