Things To Do With Vegetables When You're...
... afraid of kale and massages.
Maybe I’m just too deeply repressed and English. Maybe I read too many editions of Men’s Health in the early 2000s and now subconsciously believe my six-pack-less body is a moral failure I need to hide from the world.
Whatever the reason is, I’ve never been one for massages.
What I like to think is that this aversion is actually evidence of my profound selflessness; I can’t imagine anything worse than prodding and squeezing an increasingly middle-aged British man for half an hour so why the hell would I inflict it on anyone else?
Massaging kale on the other hand is something I can really get behind.
It’s one of those simple but deeply satisfying kitchen jobs I’ll never tire of. It’s transformative. I love that a brief massage alone, maybe with a bit of salt and oil, can turn a fibrous and occasionally unyielding leaf such as kale into something so much more palatable. No scary equipment, no chemical additives, just a bit of tender, loving handiwork.
Watch as I now segue from all this nonsense about massages to focus on kale alone. I’m lazily structuring this recipe much like an episode of The Simpsons in this regard: start with something moderately amusing but ultimately irrelevant that functions only to set up the main plot.
(Though, having said that, the very best 90s Simpsons episodes always did find a way of making that introductory silliness relevant again by the end of the episode.)
Yes, anyway, kale! I love kale. It’s a real vegetable eater’s vegetable. It is to vegetable-eating what Samuel Beckett and Alain Robbe-Grillet are to twentieth-century literature; not super popular but so rewarding if you make the effort.
You can keep ya potatoes and Hemingway.
Today’s recipe makes for a truly delicious use of kale in the form of a lasagne filled with wild mushrooms and loads of green pesto.
We forego the massaging here, instead blanching and puree-ing the kale. Adding this to the pesto makes a more “like-for-like” replacement of the consistency and intensity of a traditional tomato sauce, gently flavouring the lasagne with the pesto, while adding loads of moisture and body for the pasta to cook in. Added to the traditional béchamel and mushrooms, it is a thing of real joy.
And, like everything I share in this series, this dish doesn’t want for meat at all.
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A very green kale and mushroom lasagne (feeds about 4)
Ingredients
Green sauce