Kalettes. Ever heard of them. Neither did I until they showed up in my Community Supported Agriculture share last Tuesday.
They even have their own website.
They remind me of red Russian kale. They are a cross between Brussels sprouts and kale. Easier to digest. Nutty in flavor.
After seven years in our CSA, Lancaster Farm Fresh, I thought they couldn’t come up with much I hadn’t seen before. And, yep, they did.
I finally got around to using them yesterday. Some of them in soup. The rest. Today will become sautéed side dish for my shrimp and grits.
As for the soup, I am currently cooking from Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. For the cookbook club. Refining my techniques. I made a variation of the Tuscan bean and kale soup for dinner.
Definitely a variation. What did I use for this soup? A quart of my homemade chicken stock. Scallions. Purple carrots. A small, cubed Beuregard sweet potato. A can of low sodium cannellini beans. A smoked ham hock. Some of my cherry tomatoes from the garden.
The only seasoning added was a bay leaf, pepper, and oregano. I like the kalettes. They are milder and easily wilt into the soup.
Now, to find them locally. That should be interesting. I wonder if Whole Foods has them?
AnnieRie Unplugged 
And it is exactly this reason that I won’t join a CSA. I appreciate variety, but when everything has to be researched to find out what to do with a vegetable, it just becomes draining. Not everyone has this kind of time. It is the reason that CSA’s will put themselves out of business….and that is unfortunate.
Actually, around here, every CSA but this one gives people pretty standard, mostly boring stuff.
I dropped others because of that. Lancaster Farm Fresh has somewhere around 5000 members. Organic, fresh vegetables including many like this are grown for the members, and for wholesale sale to restaurants, hospitals, universities and organic food stores. It started with 5 farms in the co-op about ten years go. There are 125 now.
The CSAs around here adapt to their customer needs, offering choices including home delivery, and really good options to trade. I could have traded the kalettes, instead of trading the watermelon, which I was tired of getting. Traded a watermelon for two onions this week.
The rest of my share this week was tomatoes, sweet potatoes, salad greens, sweet red peppers, garlic, eggplant, butternut squash and sweet corn. 20 pounds of organic food for $33. One day out of the ground.
And, I am lucky. My husband and I both love interesting vegetables.