Kale and spinach sauce

Kale and spinach sauce make a nutritious delight to go with so many starchy-dishes; blend it in a jiffy.

Everything of course depends on the freshness of your greens; wilted, old kale and spinach are awful. So we choose to plant them in our garden; two of the easiest veggies to grow in the patch.

Just make sure you keep your hens out; they need the lutein in dark-green leafy vegetables even more than we do. A blind chicken will very soon be a dead bird.

Curly-leaf kale.

Ingredients

  1. Two large handfuls of spinach and kale, depending on how many gannets you have to feed.
  2. A smaller handful of a herb such as sweet-basil; it's my favourite.
  3. A clove of garlic.
  4. A peppadew or slither of chili.
  5. 1/2 cup of feta-cheese.
  6. 1 tsp capers.
  7. 1 tsp raw honey.
  8. A slosh of cream.
  9. A couple tablespoons of olive-oil.

Go for it

  1. Wash and devein the kale and spinach if the stems are tough.
  2. Toss the leaves into a little hot water and bring to the boil for two-minutes.
  3. Add olive-oil, garlic and the peppadew to the blender.
  4. Rinse the feta and capers of excess salt, and add along with the cream.
  5. Finally add the lightly-cooked greens and some of the water.
  6. Use a stick-blender and voila you have your kale and spinach sauce.

We've heard it so many times before how starches, and particularly those that have been refined, add the inches onto our girths, in all the wrong-places; even potato alas.

The trick is to lower the glycemic index so the sugars are released more slowly in the digestive-system; you do that by adding fat and protein. In this instance, we use olive oil, cream and feta cheese in our kale and spinach sauce.

You can also cool the starch overnight and then reheat it; this is known as retrogradation. The structure changes making it more difficult for the enzymes in your gut to reach the carbohydrate chains, slowing the release of the offending glucose-molecules.

Whole grains and retrograded-starches are good for us; those that are refined make us fat. You can be sure that a commercial kale and spinach sauce would have sugar added too; extra salt and preservatives too.

Instead we use a touch of natural-honey; interestingly despite the simple sugars it has a low GI.

Use your kale and spinach sauce to lower the glycemic index of your whole-grain toast, mashed potato or pasta.

Keep the glycemic-load down by always limiting your helpings of starches; too much of a good thing just isn't beneficial.

You've read that enjoying seven or more coloured foods every day lowers the all-risk of death and disease by a massive 33pc. This five minute kale and spinach sauce already provides four.

It is interesting that natural honey that is unprocessed will not spike your blood-glucose[1]; it has a low glycemic index, with a few exceptions that contain a sugar called melezitose.

Lutein and zeaxanthin

There are at least three phytochemicals in your green leafy vegetables that are absolutely essential to prevent age-onset blindness and cataracts.

One of them is L-dopa so we often would pour this kale and spinach sauce over broad beans on toast, sometimes with an egg.

Kale and spinach sauce on egg and broad-beans.

Our kale and spinach sauce wouldn't look so good on the menu at Beau-Contantia but for sheer nutrition and flavour it makes for an astonishingly tasty breakfast.

For starters we had it this morning with freshly-ground 100pc unrefined mealie meal porridge; a breakfast like this stays with you for the whole day. Have no fear of truly whole grains, but they are hard to get. 

Mealiemeal porridge.

Kale and spinach sauce

Kale and spinach sauce can be made literally in five-minutes.

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  1. Glycaemic and insulinaemic properties of some German honey varieties

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