Baked kale mac and cheese (Taken with Instagram)
The reaction: “Could use some more salt.”
Well, we’re having Indian summer here in Oakland, but that didn’t stop me from making baked macaroni and cheese. The recipe I used came from Bon Appetit’s 11 Quick and Easy Way to Cook With Kale slideshow. This dish seems to walk a line between hearty and healthy. (Is that even possible?)
The healthy part: I used whole wheat elbow macaroni and managed to abstain from adding in a handful of parmesan cheese to the bechamel. And then there’s the kale. I made sure that the kale leaves weren’t completely dry after blanching them to make the pureeing easier. Even if you do it that way, it’ll still be a little fibrous after pureeing.
The hearty part: this is definitely a bechamel sauce—salted butter, white flour, and whole milk! There’s also the fact that this is a pasta, so you’re not going to be winning any carb-free points here, even though it is a whole wheat pasta. And to top it off, there’s the crust of breadcrumbs and parmesan cheese.
Don’t be like me and be stingy with the salt. The pasta needs to be seasoned, the kale needs to be blanched in salted water, and the bechamel can take it. You need something to cut through the dairy!
Baked Kale Mac and Cheese (Adapted from Bon Appetit’s Baked Kale Mac and Cheese appearing in their slideshow, 11 Quick and Easy Way to Cook With Kale)
Ingredients:
1 T. salted butter
1 T. flour
1 cup whole milk
1 bunch of kale
2 cups whole wheat elbow macaroni
1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese
1/4 cup breadcrumbs (I used Panko brand)
Salt and pepper to taste
Directions:
Preheat oven to 375. Get a large pot of salted water boiling and cook macaroni based on package directions. Drain pasta and set aside.
Rinse out the pot and fill with water again. Add salt, and bring to a boil. While waiting for the water to boil, wash and de-stem kale. When the water’s boiling, blanch kale leaves for 1 minute. Using a slotted spoon, fish out kale and add directly to a blender or a container suitable for your immersion blender. (Don’t worry about getting the kale totally dry—the extra water will help you blend/process the leaves.) Set this aside.
Toss the kale water and rinse the pot out. Using this same pot, melt butter over medium heat. When foaming subsides, sprinkle in the flour and whisk constantly for one minute. When the roux turns the color of peanut butter, add in the milk while still whisking constantly. Stir continuously for 5 minutes until sauce thickens.
When sauce is thick, add in pureed kale and season to taste. (Seriously, taste it. It will need salt.) Add in pasta, and stir to combine. Turn this out into a casserole dish.
Mix together breadcrumbs and parmesan, and sprinkle on top of macaroni. Bake for 25 minutes, turning the dish around (so the back becomes the front and the front becomes the back) halfway through baking.