Kale sauce over crispy potatoes and raw asparagus (v, gf)
The kale sauce is the thing here, a highly versatile and pretty healthy sauce that you can eat with pasta, or eggs, or on a pizza, or really anywhere you want a sauce. It’s a riff on Joshua McFadden’s recipe, made vegan by using miso instead of parmesan, and with the addition of walnuts for protein and richness. You could use spinach instead of kale, or most any other green, even if it’s a little bitter. The recipe below makes almost a quart of sauce, which is more than you’ll need for the dish. Keep the rest in the fridge and use it everywhere else.
I put the kale sauce together with potatoes, asparagus, and pickled onion because a mess of veggies with potatoes is one of my favorite templates for dinner. The asparagus at the farmer’s market right now is worth eating raw; taste it, and if you disagree, you can always roast it and then use it the same way.
Yield: 2 servings (just make more potatoes if you’re cooking for more people)
Ingredients
For the potatoes
1 lb potatoes, cut into bite-size chunks (not peeled)
couple teaspoons sea salt
Olive oil
For the kale sauce - this makes almost a quart
1 bunch (~1 lb) kale, cleaned and thickest parts of the stems removed
1/4 cup olive oil
3 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
1.5 tablespoons lemon juice
2 teaspoons white miso
1 cup (~3 oz) walnuts
To serve
1/2 bunch asparagus (or however much you want to eat)
pickled red onions
crumbled feta (optional)
Method
Preheat the oven to 420°.
Put the potatoes in a pot and cover with water and a couple teaspoons of salt. Heat the pot to a light boil and let the potatoes cook until they’re starting to fall apart, which could take about 20 minutes.
Remove the potatoes from the pot (leaving the hot water in it) and spread them evenly over a Silpat-lined baking sheet. If you want, you could mash them up a little bit. Drizzle olive oil generously on top and put in the oven.
Check the potatoes after 25 minutes, shuffle them around with a spatula and keep cooking and checking at 10 minute intervals until they’re golden brown and crispy.
While the potatoes are cooking, make the kale sauce: Heat the pot with the water back to boiling. Working in batches, blanch the kale in the boiling water, for just about a minute. Remove it to a cutting board with a spider or slotted spoon, reserving the cooking water. Roughly chop perpendicular to the stem (this helps my blender keep from getting stuck).
In a cast iron pan, heat the 1/4 cup olive oil over low heat, then add the smashed garlic. Cook for a few minutes, until the garlic is golden brown but not burnt.
Add the kale, garlicky olive oil, lemon juice and miso to the blender. Blend until smooth, then add the walnuts and blend a little more, letting it remain slightly chunky.
Prepare the asparagus: Cut off the very bottoms of the asparagus spears. You can bite from the bottom, and cut wherever it seems like it’s not tough anymore. If the outer skin still seems tough but the rest of the asparagus is tasty and crunchy inside, peel off some of the skin with a vegetable peeler. Slice the asparagus spears into thin diagonal slivers.
To serve: Spread some sauce on a plate, top with a pile of crispy potatoes, then a little more sauce, a handful of fresh asparagus slivers, and a few pieces of pickled red onion. Some crumbled feta is also great here, if you eat it. You can serve all of this hot, but I like it best at room temperature.