There's Kale....and Then There's Kale

I have to be honest.  Not long ago I had never heard of kale.  There was that stuff in the deli counter that supplies the green frilly stuff between the potato salad and the meatloaf slices that the deli guy calls lettuce, which I know is kale, unless it is parsley or plastic, but other than that.....

I read someplace how incredibly nutritious is is (no one said delicious) and how it does great things for your skin and how it fills you up when you are trying to eat lots of salads, and so on.
So, long and short of it, I started putting it in the huge salads I eat everyday, and pretty soon I started to actually like its firm, sort of scrubby texture.  I began making salads almost entirely with kale. And, don't underestimate it for stir fry.  You can buy veggies already shredded or shred your own, and with or without, you can make a very decent vegetable dish or a main course. And it's cheap. I bought huge amounts of kale.

Then came the tipping point. My macarative degeneration in one eye seemed to reverse itself.  Not seemed. It did reverse itself. Not there any more.  Gone. No signs of cataracts, either, and my prescription has gone more toward toward 20/20. I had taken lutein, recommended by my doc, for years, but nothing got better with lutein. Only when I chowed down on kale was there improvement.

"Your eyes must be youthening," my eye doc said."Must be something you ate."

"Of course," said a friend of mine. "It's the kale. I've known about that for years. "

Really?  She's known about it and hasn't told me?  What kind of a pal is that?

The other day I read an article in the AJ C about how the Atlanta public schools are trying to teach elementary school pupils better nutrition. On school had them grow their own vegetable garden and take the kale they had grown and put it to salads.  They carefully cared for their kale, gave it plenty of water, and put the gently washed leaves into a bowl with their carrots and tomatoes.

"How does your  kale taste?" the teacher asked.

"Great!" and "Delicious!" the kids shouted, and they ate it.

O.K., this was probably a lesson in growing your own foods, but it served mto boost kale's reputation, too.

And then another Atlanta school (and this is God's own truth) tried to introduce kale into the cafeteria menu. This is a baccalaureate school, run by some presumably some pretty progressive, smart people.

They cafeteria served the kids fried chicken, which everybody likes, and a side dish of steamed kale.  Yes. Limp, ugly steamed kale.

 The kids were anxious to say why they liked fried chicken. "It love it because its  greasy," one kid answered.  Obvious none of the lunchroom ladies had studied the Southern Living recipe for ungreasy fried chicken.

And the kale? "Yucky!  It's nasty!" Most of them left it untouched.

Steamed kale?  I'd have to agree. Probably had a a hunk of pork in the water, too, making it both ugly and bad for you.

Lots of lessons there.