Kale - and why you should be eating it right now

We’ve got tasty recipes for this superfood (although the Irish have always known it’s good stuff).

KALE IS PROBABLY best known in Ireland as ‘the green stuff’ in colcannon.

Now it’s lauded round the world as a superfood par excellence, but back in the day it was served up to many Irish families as a special Halloween treat – little did we know there was actual goodness in there.

However, you don’t have to wait until October to get some of that leafy green tastiness into you – we’ve rounded up a selection of recipes to try out as well as a little information about the new (old) superfood on the block.

SweetOnVeg SweetOnVeg

Here are just a few of the reasons kale is good for you:

It’s one of the most nutrient dense foods in the world with 206% RDA of Vitamin A
It’s full of antioxidants
It can help to lower cholesterol
It’s high in vitamins like calcium and magnesium

Massaging kale

Apparently kale likes a little TLC as much as the rest of us. If you massage kale for 2-3 minutes with oil it breaks down the kale a little, wilting it (just a fraction) in front of your very eyes, and makes it more digestible for you. It also helps to remove a little of the intrinsic bitterness of the kale.

Nutrition Stripped Nutrition Stripped

You can eat kale raw in salads or cooked in a variety of ways. We have a few recipes to get your tastebuds tingling.

Superfood colcannon

VegaTeam VegaTeam

Traditional colcannon is potatoes, kale or white cabbage, a little milk and lashings of butter. This is a far from traditional recipe for colcannon, but it does increase the superfood power of kale immensely and is ‘clean’ as well as vegan. Worth a try, we think.

Kale and pomegranate salad

simpleprovisions simpleprovisions

If you want to add a touch of the tropical to your kale, here’s a nice recipe that combines massaged kale (yes, it’s a thing) with pomegranates, cranberries, walnuts and honey for a superfood nutritious salad.