LINCOLN SQUARE — So, how'd you spend your Howling Halloween?
Trying to stuff a North Face parka under your Miley Cyrus Wrecking Ball costume? Curled up in a ball suffering post-traumatic polar vortex flashbacks? Wasting precious hours scrolling through a Twitter feed filled with a million 140-character variations on "#Snowtober"?
Me, I was harvesting my kale.
It doesn't really matter why I chose quite possibly the most ill-timed moment ever to visit my garden plot. Just know that a sequence of events led to the following scenario:
Picture me holding a plastic bag being whipped about by 40-mph winds in one gloved hand while the other bare hand attempted to work a pair of pruning shears, a task made increasingly difficult by the growing lack of feeling in my exposed fingers. With my third hand, I attempted to keep my hood from flying off my head while simultaneously wiping a nose dripping like a faucet.
And I don't even like kale.
Patty Wetli says raw kale is barely edible, so she decided to try the chips:
Of the 32 square feet in our plot, I gave 2 over to Dave because marriage is a constant whittling away of one's own dreams and personal tastes in food. In one square he planted a chili pepper seedling that never matured and in the other kale.
Though it may be tough to chew, kale is relatively easy to grow. We even unwittingly optimized its chances for success by keeping it away from mortal enemies like beans and tomatoes and placing it near pals like onions and herbs.
Yet it didn't quite thrive the way last year's kale had, its leaves more brown than green, its growth stunted when compared with our wildly productive chard.
But in the past couple of weeks, the kale has blossomed, springing to life at just the point when pretty much every other plant in the garden was losing its seasonal battle with death.
Along with its brethren in the cabbage family, kale enjoys the cooler temperatures of fall and is even, unlike my fingertips, frost-tolerant.
So with just a handful of days left before Peterson Garden Project officially closed its community gardens for the year, I had a whole lotta kale to harvest.
It was the unwanted gift that wouldn't stop giving.
Stuck with more kale than I could pawn off on Dave alone, I reconciled myself to consuming massive amounts of Vitamin K and other beneficial anti-oxidants, but I vowed to do it on my own terms.
I would render the kale completely unrecognizable as a vegetable.
I am speaking, of course, of kale chips.
Olive oil and sea salt are to kale what marshmallows, butter and brown sugar are to sweet potatoes — a gateway to edibility.
Clearly I'm not the only person who thinks so, because a Google search of "kale chip recipes" produces a gazillion results, which frankly seemed like overkill for a process that involves three ingredients and an oven.
Yet there is an art to baking kale chips, which I soon discovered.
The oven temperature can be too high. I went with 300 degrees when 250-275 would have been wiser.
The cooking time can be too long, especially if you've already fouled up the temperature thing. Once your chips have crossed over from green to a putrid brown, you've crossed a bridge too far.
There is such a thing as too much salt.
And yet ... you can't really screw up kale chips, a bowl of which will disappear before you can say "vegetal aftertaste."
Burnt beyond recognition and overly seasoned, they're still better than kale in the raw.
For previous episodes of Garden in the City, listen here:
