The End of Something or Kale's Last Stand

I love fall, even though it means the end of garden season. There is a cold edge to the morning air, pregnant with the smell of the fallen leaves. It's the time of year when hand-traced-turkeys are hung on refrigerators, children bound into carefully raked leaf piles, and EVERYTHING has pumpkin in it.

While making the weekly menu, I struggled to come up with something new. It had to be delicious, somewhat healthy and inoffensive enough that a chance in hell existed that the children might actually eat it. And no pumpkin. Enough with the pumpkin already.

Pasta is usually a good place to start, because I know the kids will eat it, mostly. Stuffed pasta is a sneaky way to get vegetables and other things into the children, so I decided to stuff manicotti, but what with? A scan of the cupboard and the ghost of my garden revealed little but a butternut squash, some onions, a few small crowns of broccoli and some kale. I had the feeling something could be done with all this, but wasn't sure what or how.

INTERNET! The internet is wonderful because if you are considering doing something, just about anything, chances are someone else has done it, blogged about it, posted a video of themselves doing it, and has been reviewed by a dozen people that think they could do it better. The internet is sort of like the magic computer on a sci-fi spaceship, you just tell it what you want and BWWWWAAAANG, it appears in the little holo-cubby thing. Google came back with something like 1100 hits on "vegetable stuffed manicotti," so I sorted through a few of the first page, got a couple of ideas, then plugged in to my other source of deep knowledge, the Wife.

"Try cauliflower, you know how it gets all creamy when you..." GENIUS! See, this is why I ask. Cauliflower would make the perfect base to the stuffing, healthy, mild in flavor, and moist enough to hold it all together.

Now to sort out the rest. The squash and broccoli were no-brainers, just steam with the cauliflower, toss in the food processor, and bingo, ready to go. But what of the kale?

A word about kale: kale is a versatile green leafy vegetable, dark, tough and hardy, with a strong flavor and a shit-ton of vitamins. If you pick it early, and near the crown of the plant, the leaves are tender enough to eat in a salad. Otherwise they will need to be cooked in some way to be digestible. Kale is the last man standing in my greens bed, long after even the second planting of lettuce, and with hardly any care or intervention by me. A few weeks ago the little green silkworms that decimated most of my broccoli started chewing the kale, so I figured it was a goner. But lo, after a solid week of frost that killed everything else in sight (including the worms) here come some lovely new leaves on the top of the embattled kale plants! So in closing, kale is one tough bitch. Worms, frost, neglect, whatever. Kale does its thing. I was just about to pull everything in the beds and compost them all for winter, but now I must know how long the kale will make its stand.

Lovely new kale leaves. It's freaking 30 degrees out.

I decided to cook the kale as I normally would, in the cast-iron skillet, with salt, butter and lemon juice, but in the interest in keeping the calorie count low substituted a small splash of olive oil and a little veggie broth for the half-stick of butter. It was also a good way to get the onions in, as well as the kinda soft red pepper I found in the crisper. Beauty.

I must say it all worked out beautifully, and with little difficulty, though it did take a long time from start to table, which with 2 children underfoot is trouble enough. The kids devoured the manicotti, and the Wife gave the dish very high marks.

It was a great meal, cobbled together from the last hangers-on of a great season. So there you go, even when the time changes, the frost comes, and everything turns brown, nothing is over until the kale says it's over.

Papa's Garden Stuffed Manicotti

You will need:

1 box manicotti (get the high-end stuff, it really holds up much better)

For the stuffing:

1 head of cauliflower

2 or 3 crowns of broccoli

1 medium butternut squash

1 medium yellow onion, chopped

4 or 5 cloves of garlic, chopped fine

kale, spinach or other fresh greens, 4 or 5 cups

1 red pepper

appx. 2 tsp course ground salt

¼ cup lemon juice

½ cup parmesan cheese

½ cup feta cheese

For the sauce:

2 cups milk

a little splash of olive oil

½ cup of flour

½ cup parmesan cheese

Salt

Pepper

Oregano

Garlic powder

Let's cook!

Halve and clean squash, clean broccoli and cauliflower and chop into florets. Put 'em in the steamer (if you have one) for about 25 mins. If you have no steamer you can blanche for about 5 minutes and fry it up in a wok or large pan, but steaming is best.

While the veggies are steaming, heat up about 2 Tbsp of olive oil in an iron skillet or big frying pan.

Sauté your garlic and onions until they begin to get soft, then add greens and chopped red pepper.

Once the greens start to cook down a bit, dribble lemon juice over it, and ad a few pinches of salt. Repeat and taste to test. I like my greens to be nice and tart, and have a savory kick to compliment the sweetness of the rest of the veggie mix.

Greens are done when everything is soft enough to be blended up in the food processor.

Set the pan off the heat to cool a little while.

Check the steaming veggies for softness. When they are done, put them in a colander and rinse them with cold water, so you can handle them without hurting yourself. I learned the hard way. Pour off the collected steamer water from the little tray (which has lots of veggie goodness in it) into a glass measuring cup or bowl and save for later.

Put the sauté mixture into the food processor and give it a whirl. I like to do this first so that all of the tough fibers from the greens get cut up very fine. One little hard green thing in their dinner and the children will certainly abort.

Scoop the mix into a large bowl.

Cube the steamed squash and throw it into the food processor and process until it's pretty smooth. Add a little of the saved steamer water if it is too dry and chunky.

Add the cauliflower and broccoli to the food processor. Chop it up, but don’t liquefy it. Leave some nice little veggie chunks. You will certainly need to add some of the saved water as you blend. My food processor is kind of small, so I had to do this in 2 loads.

Combine all of the veggies in your mixing bowl.

Mix in feta and about ½ of the parmesan, then salt and pepper to taste. At this point, I put it in the fridge, mostly because I had to go get the kids at school, but I think the stuffing probably benefits from setting up a bit.

Preheat your oven to 375

Boil your water and cook pasta until al dente, or about a minute less than the directions on the package. Drain and rinse with cool water, again to avoid serious injury, and again, learned the hard way.

The Sauce

Just about any kind of pasta sauce would work here, tomato, or cream, any variety you like. I decided to go for a white cream sauce, just a basic alfredo style, but that was because I hadn’t been to the store, and I didn’t have the stuff on hand to do anything more adventurous, like the kooky yogurt cheese sauce I was thinking of.

Put a little splash of olive in a small sauce pan.

Add garlic, oregano (fresh of course, if you can get it) and pepper. Heat up a bit on low heat.

Add milk and whisk in flour. Stir pretty much constantly over low heat until it thickens up.

Mix in parmesan. This should thicken it up very nicely.

Add salt carefully, to taste.

If it gets too thick and starts clumping, thin with a little water.

Let cool a bit then coat the bottom of a large glass baking dish with a thin layer of sauce.

Back to the pasta!

Stuff the manicotti carefully with a small fork or spoon. They split really easily when they are cooked, which isn’t the end of the world, but they look so nice with their pleasing tubular shape, it really is a pity to bust them up.

Arranged the stuffed pasta in the baking pan, then pour the rest of the sauce over top, coating them well. I put a leave of basil on the top of each piece, partly to be fancy, partly so I knew where each one was when I go to dig them out with the spatula, in the hopes of keeping them whole and nice on the plate. Feel free to sprinkle with a little more oregano, or pepper at this point. Again, the appearance of anything that looks like part of a plant or a spice can jeopardize the whole mission when kids are involved, so use caution.

Put it in the oven and bake for 30 minutes.

Let cool, dish out with a nice salad and a glass of wine. You deserve it, this was kind of a pain in the ass.