Kale Chips

First in the Bountiful Baskets series is kale chips. We got a head of kale in a recent Bountiful Baskets pickup. I had heard of these green chips but thought they sounded awful. Not knowing what else to do, I gave them a shot. Boy was I ever surprised!! I even convinced the Snickerdoodle to try them then immediately regretted it as he kept asking for more and I didn't much want to share.

Ingredients:


Kale
Spray olive oil
Salt

Instructions:


Preheat oven to 350 degrees (f). Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.

Tear the leafy parts of the kale from the hard stalk. You can discard the stalks or save them to add to homemade veggie broth if you'd like. I tossed mine 'cause I wasn't thinking.

Spread the leafy parts on the lined cookie sheet. You don't need to leave a lot of space between them but try not to make more than 1 layer.

 

Spritz them with olive oil and lightly salt them.

Put them in the oven for 10 minutes. Watch them, when the edges start to darken, they're probably ready. I like them really crispy so I made sure they were well done but I suspect if you leave them in too long, they'll just turn to dust so keep an eye on them.

This was from a lighter batch, your chips won't shrink so 

much that the tray is full before and sparse after.

Also, sorry about the blurry shot, I didn't know it was a bad

picture until after I had already eaten them all and couldn't reshoot.

That's it, they're ready to eat. I can't tell you how to store them as ours pretty much went straight from the cookie sheet to our mouths. Yum.

Thank you for reading,
Julie

Bountiful Baskets

Are you familiar with Bountiful Baskets? Here's what their website says:

"BBFC distributes produce baskets, organic produce baskets, artisan bread and sandwich bread every other week."

I'm in no way affiliated with them except that my family has recently started buying a basket every few weeks and I really enjoy it. The value is fantastic. Here's what we got last week for just $15:

To inventory for you:

• 2 bunches of celery
• 1 head of kale
• 3 small acorn squash
• 1+ bunch of bananas
• 4 tomatoes
• 9 plums
• 8 peaches
• 3 yellow mangoes
• 1 pineapple
• 1 honeydew melon
• 8 (one got eaten) small granny smith apples
• 1 head of some kind of leafy greens
• 1 cucumber

That's a raging ton of produce for just $15.

We also tend to do the buy-up options. This particular week, we added the Asian themed basket for an additional $8.50. Here's what was in that one:

I'm going to let you figure out what all that is (because I don't actually know). It is obviously worth more than $8.50 if purchased in a grocery store or even at a farmer's market.

Finally, this particular week we also opted to do the strawberry add-on which got us 8lbs of strawberries for $11. That's $1.38 per pound/clamshell which is a pretty good deal. I wouldn't call that one a smokin' hot deal as some of the grocery stores have had their strawberries on sale for $1.50 or even down to $1.25 but the benefit there was I didn't have to make a special trip to the store for them and the price was very good.

So, why, you might ask, am I telling you about Bountiful Baskets if I get nothing out of the free advertising for them? Well, participating in their program has forced me to use some produce I've never used before and in an effort to not waste, I've tried some new recipes too. I'm going to start posting what I make using the contents of the basket so if you too have purchased through them, perhaps I can give you some ideas for what to do with it.

I'd love to hear about your Bountiful Baskets experiences, good or bad.

Thank you for reading,
Julie