If you were ever put off by particularly old, fibrous kale leaves in a salad — the eternal chewing, the unpleasant dank green flavor — it’s hard to imagine that boiling the leaves and blitzing them with fried garlic, olive oil and Parmesan completely transforms them into a silky, luxurious sauce.
OK, I’m sort of talking about myself before I learned this old-school technique from the chef Joshua McFadden. Kale sauce pasta is still one of my favorite things to cook in the winter; it’s so beloved in my circle of friends that we refer to it simply as K.S.P. in the group chat, sharing photos and enthusiastic notes on our variations every time one of us cooks it.
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Kale Sauce Pasta
The variations: It might be adding a scoop of white miso instead of grated Parm, or throwing raw scallion greens and a jalapeño into the blender instead of fried garlic. It might be a tiny addition, like some lemon zest or an anchovy, or a more transformative one, like ricotta. K.S.P. is always in rotation, and although it invites adaptation, sometimes I don’t mess with it at all. It’s so good just the way it is. If you’ve never tried it, maybe this is your week?
Greens feel so right right now. I always go back to Eric Kim’s beans and greens stew with doenjang, which I love with a big piece of toasted bread. You can use any mix of greens in his recipe: escarole, spinach, mustard greens, kale, chard, cabbage! Melissa Clark’s skillet-braised chicken with greens and olives is just as flexible — choose your own green adventure.
Ali Slagle braises broccoli rabe and chickpeas in olive oil to make them all soft and unexpectedly sweet — delicious heaped on a wide noodle and covered with grated cheese. And I love how Yasmin Fahr drops a few cups of baby spinach into her chicken and feta meatball soup to finish it off.
At the top of the year, I was complaining a bit to my husband about how we don’t have enough family traditions, and in the process I realized that we actually have so many: They’re just all food focused. Once a year, we open hundreds of oysters and roast them with butter. Once a year, we make lamb biryani.
We’re deep in cassoulet season now, and that’s one annual tradition that I highly recommend. There are many ways to make it, I know, but Sam Sifton’s recipe, adapted from Benoit in New York City, aligns with many of my core cassoulet values. It begins with making your own duck and garlic confit — one of the very best smells you can trap in your kitchen in the dead of January.
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