Kale sauce pasta, a recipe I adapted from the chef Joshua McFadden, is still one of my most favorite things to cook.
If you were ever put off by particularly old, fibrous kale leaves in a salad — the eternal chewing, the unpleasant dank green flavor — it’s hard to imagine that boiling the leaves and blitzing them with fried garlic, olive oil and Parmesan completely transforms them into a silky, luxurious sauce.
OK, I’m sort of talking about myself before I learned this old-school technique from the chef Joshua McFadden. Kale sauce pasta is still one of my favorite things to cook in the winter; it’s so beloved in my circle of friends that we refer to it simply as K.S.P. in the group chat, sharing photos and enthusiastic notes on our variations every time one of us cooks it.
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Kale Sauce Pasta
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The variations: It might be adding a scoop of white miso instead of grated Parm, or throwing raw scallion greens and a jalapeño into the blender instead of fried garlic. It might be a tiny addition, like some lemon zest or an anchovy, or a more transformative one, like ricotta. K.S.P. is always in rotation, and although it invites adaptation, sometimes I don’t mess with it at all. It’s so good just the way it is. If you’ve never tried it, maybe this is your week?
Greens feel so right right now. I always go back to Eric Kim’s beans and greens stew with doenjang, which I love with a big piece of toasted bread. You can use any mix of greens in his recipe: escarole, spinach, mustard greens, kale, chard, cabbage! Melissa Clark’s skillet-braised chicken with greens and olives is just as flexible — choose your own green adventure.
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