I found the base for this recipe in Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables by Chef Joshua McFadden, with Martha Holmberg. It’s one of my very favorite cookbooks, and I reach for it all the time. I’m slowly working my way through Joshua’s vegetable techniques (for example, he suggests grilling vegetables without oil—let’s try it and report back).
It’s difficult to capture the true vibrance and silkiness of this fresh sauce in photos. Mine don’t do it justice. I actually skipped over this recipe in the book, but then I saw it again in The New York Times. The technique reminded me somewhat of these spinach-stuffed shells, so I was intrigued. Both recipes briefly cook greens in boiling water before transforming them into something more enticing.
Joshua’s recipe calls for a full pound of kale, and the stems are discarded along the way. My broccoli cheese soup makes use of the broccoli stems, so I thought it might be fun to try including the kale stems. It worked! I just sliced the stems into 1/4-inch pieces and simmered them in a sieve for a few minutes before adding the kale to cook underneath.
