Who am I, and why do I love kale?

Kale -- besides being a delicious and uber-healthy plant -- came to be a source of great affection for me as a child for reasons beyond its nutritional value and taste.  Raised by my father after my mom died, I have many enjoyable memories of dinner with my little family, but few of them involved copious home-cooked recipes. My dear father, bless his little Mississippian heart, worked himself to the bone to keep me and my brother on the level of suburban childhood with which we were familiar, and that necessarily required long days teaching and weekends preaching.  We ate out a great deal, punctuated with the occasional meal my dad had mastered, of which there were three:

1.  Any steak product grilled outdoors. Honestly. I think this is where my love for meat was born and will not ever dwindle -- my dad's love is wrapped up in every delicious steak I eat.
2.  Chili. Not my preference on my childhood palate.
3.  His pride and joy: chicken breasts covered in lemon pepper and broiled in the oven. With microwaved baked potatoes ("want a baked pataytah with dinnah?") and a heated can of green beans. I swear, the birth of skinless, boneless chicken breasts changed our family dinners forever.

I was fine eating at home (minus the bean soup, which, you will see, did not make the list), but I also loved that we ate out so much -- the opposite of what most of my friends experienced as kids. So, when I stayed with friends, I was in heaven for the mom-cooked meal, and when my friends stayed with me, they were in heaven for the eating out. Win-win.

My most frequent home-cooked meals were served at the home of my best friend growing up, my dear Cara, by her mom Ginger, who I always thought should appear pictorially next to "mom" in the dictionary. I mean, I had some delicious food at that house. And I always appreciated that she seemed to remember things that I liked the most.

One day, she served kale. I had never heard of it.

I took a bite and remember being floored with deliciousness. What is this? I asked. Kale, she said. What is kale? This green, she said. It tasted nothing like greens I had eaten before, usually at a grandmother's house, where the tradition was to throw a million pounds of ham bones in with the greens and cook them for hours until they resembled nothing of their original state (not to mention the loss of nutritional value, which causes me to wince to this day). I fell in LOVE with kale -- its texture, its taste, and, perhaps most importantly, its feeding to me from a mom who brought me into her family dinner routine, among many, many other motherly gifts she gave me over the years.

As I entered adulthood, my appreciation for all my dad did for me and my brother came clearer.  And I decided that one thing I wanted to be able to do for him during our holidays was cook delicious meals. I became obsessed with cookbooks, food sections of newspapers, and, once the Internet happened, anything online that provided more than recipes.  At the same time, cooking for myself each night became this fabulous source of self-affirmation. I might spend an hour cooking in my tiny tiny kitchen, only to sit at my table solo and eat it in ten minutes, but the act of doing so was a way for me to slow down, appreciate where I was, despite past loss, and to appreciate my own ability to nourish myself, in more ways than one, thanks to so many who taught me how along the way. Kale made an appearance in those meals over the next nearly 20 years more than anything else I ever cooked -- and it was the ONLY menu item I insisted we serve at our wedding.

Now, I live in a tiny house that my husband, Brandon, and I affectionately dubbed Our Cottage in the Woods, with a kitchen Brandon built for me with his own two hands. And with him, I am more determined than ever to provide the nourishing home-cooked meal, especially to continue that moment of slowing down to appreciate so many things, even if I frequently work upwards of 80 hours a week. We might eat late in this house -- 9 o'clock is not uncommon for dinner -- but we eat good food as close to its original form as I can find, with help from our Karl's Farm CSA share (my love for which is described in Post One of this blog).  Now, as then, kale makes a frequent appearance, but now, thankfully, I enjoy it more often than not with good company.