I cut my thumb last week. Quite badly, actually. With a mandoline. Of course. Not the fancy French mandoline that I retired 20 years ago after I sliced into all of my right fingertips. (Legendary pain.) A new lightweight, handheld variety that was a gift. My friend raved about its user-friendly qualities. So, for the second time in 20 years, I tried a mandoline. This time, for no reason that is clear to me, I didn't employ the little hand guard that comes with it. I'll be super careful, I said to myself. Talk about being green in judgment. Just three slices of radish later, and part of my thumb lay on the cutting board. The rest was all blood. There were no stitches involved because there was nothing to stitch together; it was a clean slice. And that radish salad? Never mind. Try this one instead. Just when you thought you were done with kale salads, it will make you think again.

 

And I've also got the three randomly chosen winners of the Bergdorf Goodman Cookbook (my bandaged thumb looked so chic as I signed books at the launch party): CHRISTINE, LICIA and IAN! I'll email you to get your info. Congrats and I hope you have fun with this little book.

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Wherever you live, if you're mired down in winter you've probably grown sick of root vegetables and chicories and begun eyeing a bunch of foreign-grown produce, am I right? Stray not from the way of locavore righteousness! Instead, follow me down the garden path to these wonderfully-comforting-yet-healthy-&-nutritious creamed winter greens. I've discovered that you can make a very respectable béchamel sauce with buttermilk (the real, filler-free stuff) and it is the perfect foil for toothsome leaves, like mustard greens and kale. In a strange twist, I found myself craving this intensely green dish for breakfast. I like to start the day blowing on a spoonful of something hot, and when it's not oatmeal, a baked sweet potato or a bowl of miso soup, this does very nicely. It's also great for lunch or dinner, obviously, can be made ahead and even freezes well. Unlike me. Enough with the sub-zero temps.

(By the way, the reason I am not yet posting more on Oaxaca is that I am pitching a number of stories to a certain magazine and I am waiting to hear back on what, if anything, they would like to publish.)
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You may have noticed my total disregard of the upcoming holiday. Perhaps this is because we are going to a friend's home for Thanksgiving this year and I will not be in the kitchen. Or maybe it's just that I am weary to the bone of online discussions about the best way to cook a turkey and the incessant chatter about "sides." Upon receiving my latest issue of Lucky Peach, I was especially delighted to see that there was no burnished bird or puffy harvest casserole on the cover. (It's actually the Chinatown issue and, yet again, it's jam-packed with some of the most engaging and entertaining long-form food writing out there.) In fact, if I never hear anything more about quinoa, delicata squash or cranberry compote it will be too soon. Yet we must eat, and most of us will be sitting down to a major chowdown on Thursday, so I felt this was the perfect opportunity to continue the conversation about green sauces.
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Kale, once the darling of dreadlocked health nuts, has gone so mainstream that there must be a backlash brewing. I'm a longtime fan, having been raised in Santa Cruz, California aka hippie mecca. This leafy green is always in heavy rotation in our kitchen because we grow so much of it. My favorite is the dark, bumpy lacinato variety—also known as Tuscan, black (cavolo nero) or dinosaur—but I also appreciate the curlier types, and the sweetness of Russia kale cannot be denied. I adore the now-ubiquitous kale Caesar salad, which I first swooned over years ago at Il Buco in New York City and is undoubtedly coming to a McDonald's near you any moment now. I also gave you a very basic recipe for kale chips some time ago and it appears to have passed from one mommy blogger to another until every kid in the universe has green flecks stuck between its teeth. I'm still a fan, though I've moved on from plain to fancier stuff. You may remember me mentioning a certain obsession with Bombay Ranch-flavored kale chips, the ones referred to by New York magazine as "Doritos for health nuts." Their vegan cheesiness is nothing short of addictive. Rather than paying eight bucks for a box (easily consumed by two during a short car ride), I set out to make my own, and I was not disappointed.
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Someone recently accused me of eating a lot of kale. They said it as though it were an accusation, like I needed to justify myself. I hereby declare myself a lover of kale. I freely admit that. (Proof positive is this post. And this one. And this one.  And this one.) The stuff is good. Tastes delicious, is very versatile and packs a wallop of nutrition. Do you read Goop? Gwyneth Paltrow's blog sort of irritates me. I can't really pinpoint why but I think it just might have something to do with her total and unmitigated sense of entitlement. Just because you can spend two hours a day working out with Tracy Anderson in your custom-built blonde wood yoga studio in back of your lovely house in East Hampton, Gwynnie, doesn't mean we can. Grrrr. Yet we can make her I-need-to-lose-5-pounds-quick-for-this-movie-premiere kale juice cocktail (with lemon juice and agave nectar). Or even better, we can use kale to whip up deliciously salty-crunchy chips that we can munch on to our heart's content without even missing those salt-&-vinegar kettle chips one iota. Perfect for getting into fighting shape. Beach weather is coming, hard as it may seem to believe when we're currently at 28 degrees upstate!! (All those new little green leaves? Drooping in the cold, poor darlings!) So you gotta eat your kale, bay-bee!
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Air travel can now be lumped in with some of life's worst experiences, along with root canals and visiting the post office. I think it's safe to say I will never book another ticket on Delta. Not only did we have to pay to check one suitcase apiece, but G got hammered with another $90 because his bag was 7 pounds over their maximum. Imagine how much revenue they could generate if they charged for the excess weight around most of their customers' waistlines instead! In-flight headphones? Another charge. Crappy "snacks" that no one should be eating anyway? Get out your wallet. Sadly, we did not board with our usual stash of tasty treats, so we were forced to make do with a bag of trail mix and some water. This made dinner in LA something to look forward to with relish. Driving through torrential rains to our friend Lisa's fab Spanish-style triplex in West Hollywood, I had AOC on the brain. It's the second restaurant of much-lauded chef Suzanne Goin, a woman with an inspired palate and the face of an elfin angel.
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I'm wild about kale. (Too bad I'm still struggling to do it justice with my lame photography.) Especially this dark, bumpy kind, variously known as lacinato, cavolo nero, black cabbage, Tuscan or dinosaur. It's part of the brassica family, as are broccoli, collards and brussels sprouts. Highly nutritious, with antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, kale is high in beta carotene, vitamins K and C, and contains plenty of calcium. When chopped, it exudes sulforaphane, a chemical with powerful anti-cancer properties. Most importantly, it's delicious—in my morning juice, cooked with eggs, in bean soup, and even raw in salads.
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