Kale and Potato Puree

Last week we recommended a recipe for Kale and Potato Puree, a gorgeous green dish of warm and healthy winter eating from Gourmet. Well, we put our own advice to use quickly, and made it last weekend. It was delicious! True to form, though, we changed a few things. Here’s what we did differently, and how we would recommend making this easy, 3-ingredient dish.

This recipe is basically mashed potatoes with boiled kale whipped in. Sound dreary? No way — it’s comforting, familiar, and yet fresh. It comes together quickly: You chop kale and boil it in salted water for a few minutes, then drain. Then you heat cream (in the same pot, of course — we just rinsed it out and left the kale sitting in the colander in the sink) and boil peeled, chopped potatoes for about 20 minutes. Then the whole thing goes into the food processor and gets pureed.

Get the recipe: Kale and Potato Puree at Gourmet

That’s the basic formula. Easy, easy, easy. (Plus it reheats like a charm.) Now, here’s where we departed from it.

• Something different. We used regular kale this time, but next time we’d like to try using stronger-flavored greens, like mustard or broccoli rabe.

• Lighten up. Cream was a little heavy for us, so we substituted 2% milk for the cream. This worked just fine.

• Garlic! We were a little dubious of the flavor; we weren’t sure whether kale, potatoes, and salt would be enough. So we put five cloves of peeled garlic in to simmer with the potatoes. These added just a gentle background flavor — nothing too assertive.

• Mashed instead of whipped. We agreed with commenters that putting the potatoes through a food processor was begging for glue. Over-processed potatoes lose their creaminess and become sticky and unpleasantly heavy. So instead of putting everything in the processor or blender (which are hard to clean, anyway) we just dumped it all into our KitchenAid mixer and mixed in there. This made for easier cleanup, and left the potatoes and kale in larger chunks. Maybe that defeated the purpose of the recipe, but we found the texture to still be silky and delicious.

• Show off. We found that this mild-tasting puree was a great vehicle for good olive oil. We have several bottles we bought back from France, and a drizzle or two on this puree was a great way to show off their flavors.

Overall, this recipe is a keeper. We’re making it again this weekend, in fact. Have you tried it yet?

Related: Recipe: Kale and Potato Gratin

(Images: Faith Durand)