What would you do with some kale, broccoli, carrots, and purple bell peppers?

Kale is best cut in narrow strips and sautéed with garlic in a little oil. The other fresh veggies would work in the same stir fry.

I would stick to a kitchen sink vegetable soup (with some barley added) for the other items with a little grated cheese on top. Save the eggs for egg salad with the celery,and a little minced onion.

Broccoli, carrots and bell peppers would go great in a vegetable or chicken curry..

The kale would be nice served as a side dish with an Italian dinner of pasta.

Add the onion and celery and you have a decent salad. Reserve some of the pepper and onion and use it with the cheese to top a twice baked potato and you have most of a good lunch.

I’m with @gailcalled on the veggie soup, and would add a bit of shredded kale to it just before serving.

Great! We’re having pasta tonight. Sometimes I enjoy cooking something that scares everybody. If it doesn’t alarm them enough, I just go ahead and tell them it’s poisonous. I’ll give sauteed kale a try as a side dish. Sounds like it might be good sauteed with some crimini mushrooms and/or tossed with shredded parmesan. I don’t have any mushrooms, though.

That’s one down.

I also have a pint of fresh figs.

Fig ice cream.

I’d do a stir fry with the three other than the kale. Or maybe vegetable fried rice with the addition of the egg. For the kale, I’d by dying to try crispy kale chips! You’re on your own with the figs. ;)

@Jeruba Add some garlic to the kale and saute in good quality olive oil.

I just had an appetizer of quartered figs served with goat choose. it was yummy!

Will do, @marinelife.

Just figs and goat cheese? nothing else? Hmmm. I do have some goat cheese.

Nothing else. I was surprised at how beautifully they complemented one another. The goat cheese should be at room temperature.

I’d go for a soup. All of those items would go nicely in a soup of some sort.

If there are any vegetables left over, you might consider using them for Bubble and Squeak. Just mash some cooked potatoes and add the leftovers. A bit of grated cheese is a nice touch as well. They can be molded into potato cakes, fried until warm and a bit browned on the flat sides, and served as a side dish.

Stir Fry with some onions and serve over rice, potatoes or pasta.

I thought of a quiche with those veggies. Either go crunchy or cook some of the harder things a little. Probably easy on the peppers, but the color would be cool. Or use some cheese to offset the peppers.

After-action report #1: I quartered one fig and crumbled a little goat cheese over it. It was surprisingly good and hardly scary at all.

mmmmmmm

I would keep the broccoli and the peppers for a rice dish and dispose of the kale and carrots.
I would then cut the broccoli and peppers into decent-sized pieces and then cook it with the rice.

I would still be baffled that purple bell peppers exist.

I have to say that I really did not care for crispy kale chips, much as philosophically I really wanted to.

Really really wanted to…

Oh you temptress @Jeruba! I plan to answer this Q, but it’s so frikken hot where I am right now that I can’t even think straight. Will get back to you as soon as possible.

You know I love this question, though and my lip is starting to twitch at the delight of it

Kale chips are great. A little EVOO or grape-seed oil and sea salt-unexpectedly good. First timer in the garden and it is a bush, so if anyone wants some let me know.

I love kale steamed till tender and seasoned with a savory vinegar. It takes a bit of cooking time to get it tender but overcooking looses it’s pretty green color. The other three work fine in a stir fry with some pasta shells or diced up potatoes. Purple bell peppers are similar to the green sort, but usually sweeter. And best, they are brimming with antioxidants. Eat them raw in salads, in a stir fry, stuffed.

After-action report #2: I cut the kale into long cross-strips (perpendicular to the stem) and left the small leaves whole. Heated some olive oil and crushed garlic and then stirred in the greens and made sure they were well coated, sprinkled a dash of salt, and then sauteed until reasonably tender, meaning chewable and no longer leathery but still green and not devolved into mush.

Verdict: earthy and rather bitter. I made everybody taste it, and nobody actually demanded that I promise never to do it again, but I think we can wait a while before we repeat that experiment. I’m glad I didn’t add it to something else.

I love all these great replies! Thank you.

@Kardamom, you know I’m hanging on, waiting for your expert word. The kale is gone now, but I did forget to mention that I have four small yams.

@Jeruba Try steaming some kale and putting some Marukan Seasoned Gournet Rice Vinegar on it. I think you might like the results. And nutritionally, it’s a powerhouse of of vitamins.

OK, so I spent about 2 hours checking out, reviewing and posting recipes. Then in about 2 seconds, after I pushed the Answer button, EVERYTHING disappeared. I could have started screaming, but that would not have helped. So I started pushing my back button on my other open window (the one with the recipes) and trying to remember what I chose. Finally, I was able to find most of the recipes that I had picked, with a few others that I came up with during the 20 minutes it took me to backtrack. This time, I saved them in my Favorites folder.

Originally I had some witty repartee and comments along with the recipes. This time, I tried posting just the recipes, because I’m not feeling as witty as I was 2 hours, 20 minutes and 2 seconds ago.

OK, now I’ve devoted another half an hour to attempting to re-post the recipes with no luck. I have them saved in my favorites folder and will attempt to try again tomorrow. : (

Oy Vey!

@Jeruba; My sister has Messianic feelings about kale; I do not share them. One very benign way to sneak it into things is to slice it into very thin ribbons (there’s even a name for that process…chiffonade) and drop into soups just before serving.

You barely notice it this way.

However, kale does seem to be the universal aunt. Source

“ale is very high in beta carotene, vitamin K, vitamin C, lutein, zeaxanthin, and reasonably rich in calcium. Kale, as with broccoli and other brassicas, contains sulforaphane (particularly when chopped or minced), a chemical with potent anti-cancer properties.

Boiling decreases the level of sulforaphane; however, steaming, microwaving, or stir frying do not result in significant loss. ... kale is also a source of indole-3-carbinol, a chemical which boosts DNA repair in cells and appears to block the growth of cancer cells. Kale is also a good source of carotenoids.”

OK, attempt number three, cross your fingers!

Sweet Potatoes Stuffed with Broccoli and Feta

Asian Pasta Salad with Beef and Broccoli (this one also calls for carrots and bell peppers)

Broccoli and Chickpea Salad with Creamy Feta Dressing (with bell peppers)

Gingered Carrot and Sweet Potato Soup (might be a bit warm for this right now, but come fall…)

Raw Kale Salad with Root Vegetables (if you’ve ever read any of my food postings, this is one of my favorite things to take to a potluck, you can use the carrots as one of the root veggies, I also put rutabaga and turnip in mine. I don’t bother making the spicy nuts, I just use Trader Joe’s sweet and spicy pecans)

Sweet Potato and Bell Pepper Pasta with Goat Cheese and Herbs (the purple peppers might make the color a little funky, but it would still taste great)

Baked Salmon with Broccoli and Kale with Cashew Sauce (Super healthy and quite sophisticated)

Kale and Hamachi Tuna Spring Rolls (This is cool because they’re using the kale as the wrapper! This also calls for carrots)

Asian-style Pickled Carrots, Turnips and Peppers (this would be a nice accompaniment to most Asian rice or noodle dishes)

Tuscan Kale and White Bean Soup (another Autumny sounding dish. This also calls for carrots. I think it woud be marvelous with some crusty bread)

Kale Spanakopita (kale instead of spinach. This recipe is making my mouth water just imagining it)

Vegetable Fajitas (to which you could also add chicken or carne asada beef. This one calls for the carrots, bell pepper and broccoli)

Asian Carrot Salad (I think this would be a lovely side dish to serve with some type of grilled skewers)

Purple Cabbage Slaw with Tahini Goddess Dressing (this one calls for red bell peppers, but the fact that it also uses purple cabbage, it’s just screaming out for your purple peppers. This also calls for carrots)

Sweet Potato Skins with Black Beans (This dish would be a lovely addition to a Superbowl party)

Moroccan Carrot Salad (I love garlicky carrots)

Roasted Sweet Potato and Bell Pepper Salad (sounds like a fusion of Mexican and Japanese cuisine, yum!)

Braised Broccoli with Garlic and Cashews (another mouthwatering dish that I can taste right now!)

Chicken and Black Bean Salad with Spicy Avocado Dressing (This recipe just calls out to summertime)

Roasted Vegetable Enchiladas (a fresh take on a Mexican favorite).

Bell Pepper Relleno with Mole Sauce (all I can say about this is Wow!)

Hopefully you will find something, or many things on this list that you will like. Bon Apetite!

@Kardamom, you are consistently amazing. Thank you x 1k.

What I do when I’m composing something I have to work at is draft it in a text file first and save it off as temp.txt. That way if I hit a wrong key combination on fluther and everything disappears, I don’t have to exhaust my repertoire of swear words all in one shot. I started doing this after losing a carefully wrought post one too many times. The ones I lost always seemed more brilliant than anything I posted successfully.

@ETpro and @gailcalled, I’m not going out and buying more kale right away, but before I try it again I’ll come back here and consult your suggestions.

Quiche sounds lovely, @Adirondackwannabe, but I’m hoping to go a bit lighter. The soup and stir-fry suggestions are appealing, and the salads too.

My son did foist some kale chips on me once, and I decided that if I never tasted them again, nothing would be missing from my life.

I kind of want to do something dramatic with the purple peppers. (Remember the old song about a Flying Purple Pepper Eater?)

Last night I ate four more figs with crumbled goat cheese. Turns out I actually like the damn things. It’s never too late to dispense with an irrational misjudgment.

Dramatic with the purple peppers.

And you can always modify the stuffing to better compliment the color of the peppers.

^^ Yum!

@Jeruba on the second attempt, I did just that, wrote the whole thing out in a Word document. When I was composing it, the hyper-links were all in place, but when I tried to post that back into the Fluther text box, the hyper-links disappeared, it was just plain text, so I ended up just cutting and pasting the links out of my favorites folder where I currently have a file called Jeruba : )

@Kardamom, Word will turn your URLs into clickable links that don’t revert to your typed text when you copy and paste, and it will also (depending on your settings) replace ASCII characters with special characters that don’t work in a fluther post. A text file will leave your URLs exactly as you typed them, with the quotes, the text, the colon, and the URL, so they can be pasted straight into a post and work as expected.

I use .txt files all the time as a fast and convenient way to shed (or avoid) all the special coding and characters that are included in formatted screen and document text.

What an interesting recipe, @WestRiverrat. Sounds delicious. Have you tried it? I’m wondering how you eat it. If it were placed in front of me, I’m not sure I’d know how to attack it.

@Jeruba not that recipe but I have had raw stuffed peppers before. It is basically a salad, albeit a fancy one, in a bowl you can eat.

@Jeruba: Remember the old song about a Flying Purple Pepper Eater?

Groan and double-groan. Here’s the YouTube of this I wonder how many besides you and me get the joke.

Purple People Eater

“I said, Mr Purple People Eater, what’s your line?
He said eating purple people, and it sure is fine
But that’s not the reason that I came to land
I wanna get a job in a rock ‘n roll band”

Funny the purple people eater story, as I grew up liking them and…
I saw this globe trekker episode in Brazil where she serves up this awesome wholesome kale dish, of course with rich grass fed beef, it made it even more seductive, so I should make this my every night dish when I have time to stew.
I am grateful I have boatloads of it, and I am giving it to everybody I can. I prefer now just eating it raw, because the colder it gets the sweeter it becomes!