Kale and beans

Kale and beans is my go-to leafy green vegetable these days; this has to be the most-made dish in my repertoire. I can't think of any other dish I've cooked more times in my lifetime (assuming that dried pasta and jar pasta sauce don't count). It's a comforting, nutritious, unfussy dish--dried white beans cooked until tender in a stock flavored with vegetables and a bouquet garni, at which point garlic cooked in some olive oil and the kale are tossed in until the kale gets tender. Making this dish so many times has given me the advantage of trial and error and familiarity that I don't have with most other dishes, so here I offer some of my learning experiences.

Fun Fact #1: This is the first dish I ever made using dried beans other than lentils, which you do not need to presoak. Lesson learned: Even with dried beans, freshness makes a difference. Sub lesson #1: Dried beans cook at different rates even within the same batch. Sub lesson #2: The length of time you presoak the beans, up to a point, affects how long it will take to cook the beans. The original recipe called for dried cannelini beans. Being an at times literal follower of recipes and not having ever cooked with dried beans before, I thought it best to use exactly the type of bean called for. This ended up being a challenge--my usual grocery store haunts, as it turned out, carried all sorts of dried beans but not cannelini beans. I eventually found some in a hole in the wall grocery store. They looked like they'd been sitting around for a while, but with dried beans, I figured it wouldn't matter much in the end.

Oh, how I was wrong. It took a very long time to cook these beans even though I had soaked them overnight as directed. These were being served to company the first time I made them, and as the recipe had indicated it might take as little as 45 minutes to cook the beans, that is how much time I allotted for them to cook before the rest of the meal was ready to be served. End result: some beans were done, some were....almost done.

Fun Fact #2: Kale stems are edible. Just about every kale recipe I've ever seen instructs the cook to discard the kale stems--they are most frequently described as tough. After bemoaning the waste of kale stems when the stems can make up a signficant amount of a bunch of kale, I decided to try cutting them in small pieces and adding them to the broth to cook for a bit before tossing in the kale leaves. Victory!

Fun Fact #3: Parmesan rinds tossed in the pot with the beans and stock as they cook make soupy kale and beans totally delicious. Only authentic parmigiano reggiano will do. Sometimes Whole Foods sells only rinds, which sounds great in theory if you're making this dish every week, since parmigiano reggiano is a bit pricey, but in practice I think the rinds, sold on their own, get stale and don't add the same delectable, rich and yes, faintly cheesy dimension of flavor.