Having a few handy and easy recipes with kale make it easier to boost your diet with these leafy greens. Leafy greens are full of phytonutrients and so easy to make. So, if you are genuinely looking for easy recipes with kale, then you have come to the right place.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
- Kale has Become Quite Popular
- 6 Easy Recipes with Kale
- Kale: The Complete Guide to the World’s Most Powerful Superfood
- Q + A with Author Katie Pederson about Kale
Kale has Become a Popular Foodie Ingredient
Kale has become quite popular these days. Sure the super clean eaters and green smoothie drinkers are very into it. They even have blogs written about how to massage your kale! Yes, it’s true. I won’t share, so just trust me on this.
Even Whole Foods Brand Loves Kale
Whole Foods Market gives it a perfect score of 1000 on its ultra-confusing ANDI food scoring system. For the record, I do not fully support the ANDI system because otherwise healthy foods, such as chia seeds, that are higher in calories are automatically given a lower ANDI score. Even though chia seeds are very healthy too.
Kale is Not Just a Fad Food
But back to the kale. This is not just a food fad with the health crowd either. I mean this super green superfood is now being served at the finest of restaurants.
Celebrity chefs and foodie magazines like Bon Appétit and Food & Wine are showcasing mouthwatering recipes all centered around the leafy green culinary superstar. Cauliflower and Kale Au Gratin anyone? Or how about Mashed Potato and Kale Cakes?
So, now that we know we’re not the only ones that love kale, how about some easy recipes with Kale to add to your recipe box?
6 Delicious and Easy Recipes with Kale
Some of the most delicious are also the easy recipes with kale. Adding chopped kale to a salad, to a power bowl, to a sauteed pan of white fish could not be easier. Plus, there is tremendous benefit to eating kale. Want to learn more? Click here to learn about the health benefits of kale and the three ways we love to cook kale.
#1: Shrimp and Kale Salad
Easy Recipe with Kale: This delicious kale salad is full of flavor. For this easy recipe with kale, just simply mix chopped kale with spinach greens. Add chopped watermelon, fresh blueberries and sauteed shrimp. If you like a little goat cheese or feta, sprinkle it on top. Then use a savory balsamic glaze or homemade Italian Dressing.
#2: Easy Vegetarian Kale and Millet Power Bowl
Easy Recipe with Kale: This easy kale recipe is a piece of cake to make. It’s our homemade Vegetarian Millet Bowl with pepitas and fresh vegetables. Pair this with a tall glass of homemade lemonade or watermelon juice.
#3: White Fish and Kale Saute with Cashew Cream Sauce
Easy Recipe with Kale: For this recipe, I just added fresh White Fish to a large cast iron skillet with extra virgin olive oil. Then, I gently cooked cooked the fish until mostly done. Added in a cashew cream sauce with a little parsley, salt and pepper.
When the white fish was completed cooked, I added chopped Lacinto Kale and sauteed gently until it withered. Absolutely delicious!
#4: Brown Rice and Kale Power Bowl
Easy Recipe with Kale: This brown rice and kale power bowl is perfect for the summer. Starting with a bed of chopped curly kale, add brown rice or cauliflower rice. Then 1 cup of broccoli rabe, fresh garlic, fresh lemon squeeze.
If you want to add some protein, add sauteed shrimp, salmon or chicken.
#5: Cornbread with Jalapeño and Kale
Easy Recipe with Kale: These delicious Cornbread with Jalapeno and Kale are delicious. You can add them to any salad with protein dish or a side dish to a casserole or BBQ.
#6: Easy Kale Smoothie
Easy Recipe with Kale: Blending kale into a smoothie along with fruit makes it easy to create your own health bar-style beverages at home. This Choco-Kale Health Shake recipe is from page 34 of my book and takes just minutes to make.
Easy Recipes With Kale
These Easy Recipes with Kale are super nutritious and perfect for any time of year. From power bowls to side dishes and kale salad recipes.
- Prep Time: 5 minutes
- Total Time: 5 minutes
- Yield: 1 1x
Ingredients
- 1 tablespoon chia seed
- 2 or 3 tablespoons raw cacao powder OR ¼ cup cacao nibs
- 2 cups coconut milk
- 2 cups raw baby kale
- ½ avocado
- 1 teaspoon cinnamon
- 8 ice cubes
- Stevia to taste
Instructions
Add all ingredients to a high speed blender and process until smooth and creamy.
Drink immediately.
Last Step! If you loved our recipe, leave us a review below. This helps future recipe makers and ensures continued high-quality recipes for years to come!
Kale: The Complete Guide to the World’s Most Powerful Superfood
Entire books have been dedicated to kale including Dr. Drew Ramsey’s 50 Shades of Kale and holistic health coach Stephanie Pedersen’s Kale: The Complete Guide to the World’s Most Popular Superfood.
The kale craze is probably here to stay, mostly because kale truly is one of the most versatile superfoods on the planet. I decided to catch up with Kale author Stephanie Pedersen and let her share how the hottest vegetable on the food scene earned its spot in the limelight….
Q + A With Kathie Pederson about Kale
Clean Cuisine did an amazing interview about kale and also got some easy recipes with kale from author Katie Pederson. Here’s how the story goes!
#1: What might motivate someone to get a little bit excited and want to start eating kale?
Stephanie Pedersen: Sure thing! I bet most people don’t realize how amazing kale can make your skin look. Thanks to its high content of skin-beautifying omega-3 fatty acids, antioxidants and vitamins A, C and E, adding kale to my own diet got rid of my monthly breakouts, softened my crow’s feet and helped fade my sunspots.
Kale can also help joints feel better and promote faster healing between sessions of heavy exercise thanks to its outstanding number of anti-inflammatory flavonoids as well as omega-3’s.
Most important to my own life, kale is a powerful detoxifying food. Pregnant during the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks; I was exposed to a massive amount of toxins that were passed on to my son, who was born with off-the-charts levels of heavy metal poisoning.
Kale puree was one of the mainstays I used to rebuild his immune system and naturally detoxify his small body. From hiding kale in smoothies and marinara sauce to green eggs and mashed potatoes. I minced kale leaves into soup and meatballs and pots of brown rice, millet and quinoa. Kale truly is gloriously versatile!
#2: Clean Cuisine: What is it about kale that makes it such a powerful detoxifying food?
Stephanie Pedersen: Kale is rich in glucosinolates, which are a sulfur-containing phytonutrient compound with strong detoxifying effects. Plus it is rich in fiber, which is always detoxifying.
#3: Clean Cuisine: Do you have any special tips for buying or storing kale?
Stephanie Pedersen: First, don’t wash your kale before storing it. Washing kale before storing it encourages spoilage and hastens nutrient loss.
The best thing to do is wrap it or bag it and place it in the fridge. It is best to use kale quickly because it will lose important nutrients the longer it hangs out in the fridge. If you notice the leaves yellowing, toss it; not only will the flavor be too strong, the nutrients will be almost nill.
#4: Clean Cuisine: What do you think about buying those big pre-prepped kale bags?
Stephanie Pedersen: Pre-prepping kale is a nutrient no-no. Cooking magazines, mommy blogs and television chefs champion the practice of prepping veggies in the fridge to encourage healthy nibbling and easier weeknight cooking.
In theory, the idea is awesome but in reality pre-cut fruits and veggies lose between 10 to 25 percent of their vitamin C and carotenoids. That’s because oxygen destroys antioxidants. When kale (or any produce) is cut, the cut area is instantly exposed to oxygen and nutrients instantly start to breakdown.
#5: Clean Cuisine: Let’s talk a little bit about the versatility of kale.
In my opinion, I think the reason kale is taking the culinary world by storm is not just for the health benefits, but for the fact that it has such tremendous culinary range. Despite its rich green color, kale can keep a very low flavor profile and manages to hide out in super diverse recipes. Can you give us a rundown of the different kale recipe ideas you have in your book?
Stephanie Pedersen: Sure! Here are just a few easy recipes with kale.
Stephanie’s Easy Recipes with Kale:
Here are more super easy recipes with kale to add to your menu this week. Thank you Stephanie for being so generous with your ideas on easy recipes with kale.
Easy Kale Recipes for Breakfast
Kale pairs beautifully with any number of egg recipes including:
- Breakfast Casseroles
- Quiche Recipes, try this Quiche with Spinach (add a bit of kale to the recipe)
- Frittatas, such as this clean Spring Frittata Recipe
- Scrambled eggs
- Omelets made with pastured eggs
- Blanched kale can also sneak into muffins and kale puree is delicious in whole grain pancakes and whole grain waffles.
Easy Kale Recipes for Soups, Stews + Chilis
Boost the nutritional value of almost any soup, stew or chili by adding a large bunch of de-ribbed and coarsely chopped kale to the broth and then wilt it for about 10 minutes or so.
Easy Recipes for Kale Salads
The key to making a great kale salad is to cut the leaves very thin. I like to chiffonade them. To do this, derib the leaves, stack five or ten of them on top of each other, roll them up into a tube, and cut the tube of leaves into super-thin slices. They are easy to make, pretty and ready to use in salads, or to sauté or steam.
Try this Easy Quinoa and Kale with Pomegranate recipe.
Easy Recipes with Kale Dips + Chips
Instead of spinach dip, why not try kale dip? Like this Kale and Artichoke Dip
Easy Recipes with Kale for Dinner Entrees
You can also work kale into any number of dinner entrees including pasta dishes, stir-fry, pilafs, etc. Try this simple Sauteed Kale and Shiitake mushrooms recipe.
Easy Recipes with Kale for Dessert
Kale in desserts? Yes! Kale desserts can be super healthy, super easy and (yes!) super tasty! In my book I have all kinds of kale desserts including frozen popsicles, cocoa-dusted kale chips, pudding, kale cookies, kale brownies, etc.
Okay… back to the Q + A with Stephanie Pederson
#6: Clean Cuisine: I love all of your amazing recipe ideas! You are clearly fabulously creative in the kitchen. Have you always been such a healthy and adventurous eater?
Stephanie Pedersen: Actually yes, I have always been a naturally clean eater. My mother was a junkfood addict and she didn’t know how to cook, so we grew up on a lot of canned-soup-casseroles, boxed foods, and so on.
However, I was lucky enough to grow up with a lot of kids who were first generation Americans, so I used to hang out at their houses so I could eat the Korean, Indian, Chinese, Polish, Spanish, Italian, Mexican, Iranian, German and Israeli food.
Plus, my dad is Danish, so I used to hang out with his family and eat all those wonderful Scandinavian dishes. In getting to eat all those wonderful foods, I realized that most cultures eat close to the earth. They have created systems of eating based on the plants, animals, spices and even ways of food preservation, immediately available to them.
All that said, I cleaned up my diet even further after giving birth to my first son. As I mentioned earlier, I was pregnant during 9/11 and inhaled a lot of toxins that day and my son was born with severe heavy metal poisoning. I was pretty sick myself, too. To heal us both I went on a four-year journey of extremely clean, alkalizing eating, during which time I got very into kale and started to experiment with it many different ways in my cooking.
#7: Clean Cuisine: Small diet changes that become a regular habit, such as drinking a SuperGreen Smoothie every day, can be the gateway to a total lifestyle makeover. But how about you—what does a typical day of eating look like for you?
Stephanie Pedersen: I love this question! I wake up with stretching and a glass of room temperature water with a splash of vinegar. I find this really alkalizes me and wakes me up. Plus, it’s detoxifying. I live in NYC, so I am mindful of my need to constantly be detoxifying. I can’t eat first thing in the morning, so I’ll typically walk the mile to school with my third son (my oldest two sons go to a boarding school), then I’ll walk back home and make a huge glass of green juice.
Lunch is usually a bean and veggie dish–sometimes Mexican-inspired or a chickpea-spinach curry. Or something similar. Snacks are a handful of nuts or a glass of veggie juice. Dinner is typically a very large mixed veggie salad with some type of protein. Sometimes I have a stir fry or a bowl of veggie chili or some type of soup. I don’t do pasta or pizza or other gluteny things as I tend to get headaches if I eat a lot of wheat.
Clean Cuisine: Thank you so much for all of your time Stephanie and for the great kale tips! I know our Clean Cuisine readers learned a tremendous amount.
The Kale Craze | Christophe's To Go
Tuesday 7th of July 2015
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