Thanks to the zeitgeist and some serious lobbying from such lovely people as Kristen Beddard of The Kale Project, kale is becoming more readily available to Parisian cooks. I myself order it from a grower based in the Somme through my local Ruche qui dit oui! outpost*: it’s the curly kale variety, which he poetically calls chou plume (feather cabbage).

Last time I had the opportunity to cook with kale was a year ago, when I spent a couple of weeks in Canada, and back then I’d made a couple of kale recipes: kale chips, and multiple bowls of spelt pasta with goat’s milk ricotta and wilted kale.

But now that I can envision a bright future with lots of kale in it, I want to explore more options. So I’ve turned to Twitter to ask about your latest favorite kale recipes, and I am now collating my own research with some of your suggestions for easy reference.

I’ll note that all of these recipes can be made interchangeably with any kale variety, be it curly, purple, or (my favorite) dinosaur.

Thanks to all of you who contributed ideas, and naturally, if you have a one of your own that’s not in the list, please feel free to add it in the comments section!

* Read David Lebovitz’s post for more about La Ruche qui dit oui!

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Silencio is the name of a membership club that opened a little over a year ago in Paris, with creative help from David Lynch. It’s built way underground, and the ambiance is quite eerie, with dim lighting and a Lynch-designed decor that’s all smoked mirrors and faded gold*.

Access is reserved to members until midnight, when the place turns into a more classic nightclub, and during this first half of the evening, they get to watch films in the twenty-four-seat cinema, enjoy private concerts, or just hang out and drink cocktails at the bar. And every Saturday night, from 8 till 10, a guest from the world of food is invited to host a tasting session and meet the members.

Two Saturdays ago, the guest was yours truly, and the theme I had chosen was superfoods: my idea was to serve four little dishes in which a maximum of ingredients would be foods that are notoriously good for you, offering a wide range of nutrients and possessing magical disease-fighting powers.

I approach this sort of thing with equal parts excitement and trepidation, and prepared as much as I could beforehand, drawing up multiple lists to steady me. Then, with my friend Mary** joining me to help, I spent the afternoon cooking in the club’s galley kitchen.

The tasting started with kale chips, since kale is newly available in Paris and Kristen, of the Kale Project, had kindly helped me procure a few bunches of dinosaur kale and curly kale.

We moved on to a sweet potato mash — French-grown organic sweet potatoes roasted in the oven, mashed with the skin on and spiked with fresh ginger and lime juice — topped with a savory granola made with mixed rolled grains, sunflower seeds, and hemp seeds.

Then came miniature pizzette, on a no-knead dough of einkorn wheat flour, topped with a little ricotta, thinly sliced broccoli, and a dollop of squash seed pesto. And finally, dessert was two-bite servings of chocolate buckwheat cake.

The event went beautifully well, and I had a fun time skipping back and forth from the kitchen to the bar, chatting with visitors, telling them all about kale, and superfoods, and why you should eat them.

As a souvenir from that evening, I wanted to share the recipe for the savory granola I served as a topping for the mashed sweet potatoes. It is derived from this one, with a few modifications: I used mixed rolled grains, added some hemp seeds, used nutritional yeast rather than parmesan to make it dairy-free, and added some barley malt syrup so it would brown nicely in the oven. And I flavored it with the hot Cajun spice mix that was included in a sample Gastronomiz box I received in preparation for an article I’m writing about culinary subscription boxes.

The resulting granola can be served as a rather addictive snack with drinks, it can top any kind of vegetable — especially mashed or steamed — for a bit of textural contrast, and it does really well over a salad of grated carrots and beets.

Have you ever had or made savory granola? How was it served, or how did you use it?

{For more granola goodness, check my basic granola formula and my raw buckwheat granola.}

* You can read more about the club’s interior design in this interview with designer Raphael Navot.

** She’s a food stylist and she’s wonderful to work with. You should hire her!

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{This is part of a series in which I share three delicious things recently tasted and enjoyed. Please feel free to share your 3VGT list in the comments below, or on your own blog!}

My latest “three very good things” are as follows:

~ Pistachio honey from Sicily

Maxence and I recently chanced upon a gelateria* in Paris’ seventh arrondissement. It was pouring rain, but that didn’t lessen the pull of gelato one bit, and as we sat down to our little tubs of vanilla (for Maxence) and chocolate sorbet (for myself), I noticed a shelf stocked with miscellaneous jarred goods of Italian origin.

Among them, a Composto Miele e Pistacchio from Sicily, described on the little label as a mix of 85% honey and 15% pistachios. These being two of my favorite things yet seldom seen together, I promptly bought a jar. We tried it on toasted sourdough the next morning, and were smitten with this creamy, golden spread, the flavors of honey and pistachio melding together in a most titillating way.

The only problem is that it is disappearing fast, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to get more: the lady who served our ice cream informed us that the gelateria would be closing soon, and the company that makes the honey, a Gioiello di Sicilia based in Milo, Sicily, has a limited online presence: the website listed on the label no longer exists, and their facebook page is dormant.

So what I plan to do instead is make my own: I’ll mix some of the creamy springtime honey I bring back from the Vosges with a bit of the pistachio paste from Terre Exotique I’ve been saving for just this type of worthy purpose.

* VasaVasa, 41 avenue de la Bourdonnais, 75007 Paris, +33 (0)1 47 05 84 30.

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Illustration by Olivier Valentin. Click to enlarge.

For this new installment of our Draw Me A Fridge series (read about it here), Alexia spoke with food writer Claire Chapoutot.

Claire Chapoutot is better known as Clea, of Clea Cuisine-fame, a food blog in which she’s been presenting her mostly vegetarian recipes (she describes herself as a flexitarian) since 2005. Claire has two new cookbooks out: Recevoir en bio and Solo et bio (La Plage editions).

Although her blog and recipe books are only available in French (for now), her recipes are so delicious they are worth brushing up on your high school French, or registering to your local Alliance Française.

But as a bonus for non-French-speaking readers, Claire has kindly allowed me to translate her pain d’épices recipe, one of Alexia’s personal favorites (see bottom of post).

AC: What are your fridge staples?

CC: Each shelf is dedicated to a specific category of products: on the top shelf are my homemade yogurts (with cow’s milk for my daughter, and vanilla soy milk for my boyfriend and myself). The shelf below is for jams — all prepared by my mom! Then on the shelf below, I store all sorts of condiments and mustards, umeboshi prune paste, marinated artichokes and other stuff.

The next shelf is for fresh products. Right now I have ham, tofu and ravioles in there. I also have a big Tupperware-like box, in which I store cheeses. And a bowl with eggs right next to it — I find they keep longer in the fridge.

In the crisper, I have vegetables that don’t do well in the open air, as well as fresh ginger and bags of prunes once they’re open, to keep then nice and moist.

Then you have the door… also very well organized! I have my more exotic condiments in there, such as tandoori and curry pastes, wasabi, ginger and preserved lemon paste by Le Voyage de Mamabé, tomato concentrate, small bottles of lemon and lime juices (which I use when a recipe calls for only a little bit), bottles of all sorts of non dairy milks and, when we have them, fruit juices.

I also store the more fragile vinegars in the door, such as a pomegranate-flavored one, and bouillon cubes that I find less gritty when kept cold. I almost forgot: you will also find my matcha tea, agar-agar and the more “alive” of organic flours, such as chestnut flour.

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