on boiling (and fighting)

The fight I'm mostly likely to have with my mother when I go home is a fight about tomatoes. She buys them year-round; I don't. She thinks the campari tomatoes she buys at Trader Joe's in February are Really Yummy and Fresh, while I think the only acceptable time to buy a tomato is when it's summer and the tomato is sitting bright and plump on some sort of wooden table, recently plucked from its vine by a local human hand. Make fun of snobbery all you want but they taste better. Winter tomatoes are pale and mealy and sad and why would you even bother, is my thinking, but my mother gets to make her own decisions and I have to accept her and the tomatoes that she buys in February, even though maybe they were picked by severely mistreated workers??? She also buys pre-sliced balls of mozzarella, which, why? In related news, did you read about the cheese that's actually sawdust? Did you know it's very easy to grate and slice your own cheese??? It is!!! Anyways what I'm trying to say is family is about unconditional love and also picking your battles and my mother is a very good person. 

In terms of ingredients and their propriety everyone has their own boundaries and rules and value judgments. I won't buy out-of-season tomatoes but I will buy something like fennel year-round even though right now I think it's coming from Mexico. I'm happy with what a particularly discerning former coworker once called "the winter tomato of bananas," the pervasive cavendish, which we Americans consider our only option because it usually is. And I'll buy the sad kale at the not-fancy grocery store because in February that's all we have to work with and I want to eat some dark leafy greens, okay!

Recently I've taken to boiling it, which is the most unsexy thing you could possibly do to a vegetable. Other part-Irish kids might share my Corned Beef and Cabbage-related PTSD and fear the pervasive fartiness that fills your kitchen when large amounts of cabbage are boiled with reckless abandon. But it's the best way, I've found, to soften less-than-perfect greens that somehow manage to be wilty and chewy all at once, far more civil (and more effective!) than sautéing them into submission. They come out a very green blank canvas that you can sauce however you like, or store plain in large quantities in your refrigerator if you want to feel like an extremely prepared adult human.

Boiling things also makes me feel like Tamar Adler, which is reason enough to do the thing. The first chapter of her book, An Everlasting Meal, is titled How To Boil Water (!!!!) and serves as an extremely convincing argument for (and thoughtful introduction to) the technique. Here she writes:

"Our culture frowns on cooking in water. A pot and water are both simple and homely. It is hard to improve on the technology of the pot, or of the boil, leaving nothing for the cookware industry to sell. "

and then:

"We think we're being bullish with vegetables by putting them in water when we're actually being gentle."

We're being gentle. We're not charring it in the oven, not searing it in a shiny puddle of oil. We're being tender and getting tender in return. We're using salted water, plumping it with flavor while taking out its raw hardness. We're preparing it, quite literally: preparing it for whatever we might want to do to it later. We're letting a vegetable be a vegetable! Boiled potatoes, boiled broccoli, boiled greens: they can all be dressed simply and enjoyed simply, not any sort of huge revelation, just good food. They can be layered into sandwiches or plopped into soup or swished into a pan of pasta. They can even be cooked again tomorrow, charred or seared, if we feel a need to give them new life. 

Now back to the kale. Boiled kale is the sort of vegetable side you'll find at one of those casual old-school vegetarian restaurants in, say, Western Mass or Asheville, NC or any other longstanding hippie community. You can usually pair it with a mountain of brown rice and tempeh smothered in sauce, vegetarian comfort food that's a far cry from a) pizza or b) some sort of '70s margarine-laden casserole. The thing to do is douse your greens in nutritional yeast and Bragg's and sriracha and go to town. Of course you can do this at home, too. Eat a whole green pile by itself or use it to cover a bowl of curried tofu and vegetables your roommate made for lunch and is willing to share. Nestle it into a bowl with a pile of cooked lentils and a piece of fried toast. The kale's clean lack of oil lends a lightness that sautéing can't offer: this is good not because oil is bad, but because sometimes we want another option. 

Boiled kale wants for dressing, so it's important to have condiments at the ready when you sit down to eat it. One of the things that makes me feel most ungrateful and high maintenance and unable to just, like, enjoy my food is the harried act of getting up from the table or couch WHILE STILL CHEWING in order to grab a bottle that will make said matter taste better. Be prepared, is what I'm saying. Here's how to make this thing. Share some with your mom.

Boiled Kale

1 head kale, washed
salt
nutritional yeast, bragg's liquid aminos, and sriracha (or whatever other sauce you want to sauce with, you can really just go ahead and express yourself here.)

Bring a pot of salted water to a boil. You want it to be salty like the sea; taste it before it gets too hot. Remove the stems from your kale and save them for sautéing or stock-making. Pull the leaves into large bite-sized pieces. Once the water is boiling, drop in the kale and let it cook for 5 minutes. Drain and let cool.

Dress a large pile of kale with nutritional yeast, bragg's, and sriracha, all to taste.

Oh, and a note: if you have perfect, fresh-from-the-market kale, like if you live in California or something, this is still a nice thing to do to it.