A Ton of Cornbread and the Best Kale Ever

Last week I made skillet cornbread, adapted from Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice, with some help with substitutions from Vegan Dad. As suggested in that post, I curdled soy milk with some cider vinegar to replace buttermilk, used earth balance instead of butter, and did not attempt to find a substitute for the bacon. Instead of using soy yogurt for some of the 3 eggs, I used flax meal mixed with water for all 3. The original recipe is available on google books (see link above) - you just need to scroll up a few pages to find the rest of it.



Man was this good. Not dry, not too moist like some recipes I've tried (Moosewood's, for example), and not weirdly sweet like cornbread can be sometimes. It also browned really nicely all over. Next time I think I'll increase the salt a little, decrease the sugar, and add some scallions and maybe red bell pepper to make it a little more savory overall.



One thing to note - I'm sure the baking time would be affected if you use a non-cast iron pan, even if it's the same shape and size. This was a 10" pan. With all the substitutions, my baking time was almost 50 minutes, up from I think 35 in the recipe.



I ate a lot of it just warmed up with some barbecue sauce (from Veganomicon). Here's some with kale prepared in the Best Kale Ever method (see below).



And here's some more, again with barbecue sauce, again with the Best Kale Ever, but also with lentils.



Best Kale Ever

Some people might think I eat a weirdly large amount of kale, but I think most people eat weirdly little of it. Maybe I can help bring the greens to the masses.

- Dice about a quarter of an average sized yellow onion and a mince a couple cloves of garlic, if you feel ambitious. This will still be almost the best kale ever if you skip the onion.
- Wash a third or half a bunch of kale (any variety), and don't worry about shaking all the water off. You want it to steam itself in the pan. Chop it up - no need to discard the stems unless they're really thick and tough. Why people do that, but then go and eat things like celery, I will never understand.
- Add a little olive oil to a cast iron or other non-stick pan, and heat to medium.
- Add the onions and garlic to the hot oil, saute with a sprinkle of salt and pepper for a couple minutes.
- Add the kale and saute/steam until the stems are tender, stirring frequently.
- Add a little drizzle of toasted sesame oil in there at some point.
- When it's about done, turn off the heat and add:
- A splash of soy sauce or tamari
- A little rice vinegar
- A tablespoon or so nutritional yeast
- Stir it up and taste for seasoning
- Put in in a bowl.
- Drizzle tahini on it. Note - if your tahini cannot be drizzled per se, you are buying gross tahini that was probably made in Missouri at a commune. I don't care if that stuff is organic. Buy the real Middle Eastern kind or don't bother. For real.