Mushroom Stroganoff

When you go to a pub in England, they always have a few vegetarians on hand to feed the crowd.  Oh, whoops, did I say vegetarians?  I meant vegetarian dishes.  There are usually but a couple options, tried and tired and true:  the ever-changing seasonal risotto and a Mushroom stroganoff.  If you go to a fancy pub where they actually have a creative chef, then you might get a few more oldie but goodies thrown in, but those are the two that I see on almost every menu I encounter.  

I'm sick of the risotto, but with a few good ingredients and a hunt for mushrooms that aren't plain white buttons and you've got yourself a really nice dinner that I'm happy to make at home.  Use fresh pasta - if you don't make it yourself, I'm finding most groceries now carry a selection of fresh egg-pasta over with the fancy overpriced ravioli section, and sometimes they even have whole wheat pasta.  It's worlds better than the dehydrated stuff, which always seems to hang around in my cupboard forever in half-box portions.  

I loved beef stroganoff when I was a kid and when I became vegetarian, my mom would put cubes of tofu in my portion to replace the beef.  She told me later that, sigh, she still used beef stock, because what else are you going to use for a base?  I'm glad I got over my "tofu in everything" obsession.  It has its place as I'll eat it in stir fries all day long but as a meat substitute I find it horrid now.   Apparently, we didn't know about how delicious and good mushrooms were in this classic dish instead.  

This recipe is healthy yet comforting and makes for a nice post-hike dinner with its earthy tang and super fast effortless time from fridge to plate.  The longest part is waiting for the dehydrated mushrooms to come around.  I use both fresh and dried mushrooms in whatever varietals I can find.  Usually the dried mushrooms are fancy varieties but cheaper than fresh, but a dry springtime means we don't have the variety of fresh I normally count on.  Don't discard the soaking water- add all but the grit that collects at the bottom in the stock to make a rich, earthy meatless base.  Feel free to go a bit wild here:  shiitakes and morels and pied du mouton.  Mushrooms are the stars!

Recipe:  Mushroom Stroganoff

Serves 4

olive oil for frying

1 onion, sliced

2 or 3 garlic cloves, crushed and chopped

200g (2 cups) mix of fresh mushrooms, wiped off with a towel and sliced

100g (1 cup) dried mushrooms, soaked in hot water for at least 20 minutes

1 leek, white and light green part only, diced

100ml (1/2 cup) stock- the mushroom soaking liquid and additional vege stock if needed

1 tsp paprika, hot or sweet, your choice

1 tsp tomato paste (or tomato puree as they call it in the UK) 

1 tsp mustard

200g (2 cups) fresh pasta

4 tablespoons sour cream or creme fraiche, full-fat

1 lemon

a couple Tablespoons wine

handful of fresh dill, chopped

handful of fresh parsley, chopped

salt & pepper

Set a large pot of salted water on the stove to boil for the pasta.  Heat oil in a large fry pan.  When hot, add the onion and leek and cook until soft and starting to color, about 10 minutes.  Add the fresh mushrooms, the drained formerly dried mushrooms, and the garlic.  Turn the heat up and fry for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.  Stir in the paprika and tomato paste, cook for an additional minute.  Add the vegetable and/or mushroom stock and a glug of wine and let it cook down to half.

Meanwhile, cook the pasta:  fresh stuff only takes 3-5 minutes.  Once al dente, drain and toss with a little oil to keep it from getting sticky.  

Once the mushroom stock has reduced, add the sour cream and turn the heat down to simmer for just a couple more minutes.  Season with salt and pepper.  

Plate the pasta, top with the mushrooms and sprinkle with a squeeze of lemon juice and fresh herbs.  

Boozy Oversimplified Banana Bread/Cake

I have a really complicated relationship with the Cavendish banana.  I can barely choke one down- the overly starchy soft texture that coats your teeth is just awful.  I know they are essential when on the trail- I can really push myself to eat half of one when my leg cramps start up- but I consider the banana more enemy than friend, even when it is magically making my cramping mucles feel like new again.

And don't get me started about artificial banana flavor. 

Somehow, banana in baked goods is really pleasing- any rage or anger about bananas pretty much melts away.  I realize it's the un-ripe yellow-skinned banana that is repulsive to me.  When the skins turn black and the innards turn to mush is when I come to terms and actually like banana.  It's rather a crap time trying to eat one in the leaky state, but the sweet, heady ripeness that borders on rot is just hedonistic.  

This is why I generally have a bunch plus a handful of loose bananas in the freezer- I love a good 'nana bread.  I've played around a bit with different versions over the years, and this is really the simplest thing to whip up in the kitchen.  I found that I don't like walnuts or dried fruit or anything else to roughen up the bread.  Feel free to add to your heart's content- about 60-100 grams of walnuts or sultanas would do nicely if you are into that sort of thing.  The recipe that I've adapted from the most comes from Nigella Lawson.  She soaks dried fruit in rum before adding it to the cake.  I took it one step further and added a shot directly to the cake.  I'm not a rum drinker and rarely have it on hand, so I reach for the giant bottle of scotch from the shelves of the duty-free shop.  

Finally, last summer while I was hiking across the Lake District on the Coast to Coast trail, I stayed at a great B&B.  It was a renovated farmhouse with bits of the ruined abbey down the street "borrowed" in the building process.  They had a fabulous breakfast spread and correctly identified banana bread as banana cake.  It has eggs, flour, and sugar in it.  Sounds like a cake to me!  Yet still, we insist on calling it bread either out of habit or stubbornness or misguided attempts to sell this as healthy because it's filled with banana goodness, and to sneak in a slice for breakfast without hesitation.  

Also:  cream cheese.  It's the best thing for this.  

Recipe:  Banana Bread  

1oz shot of rum or whisky

175 grams (1 1/4 cup) white flour (I have mixed in some wheat flour in mine)

2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

125 g (1.2 cup) unsalted butter, melted, plus a bit more for greasing

150g (3/4 cup) sugar

2 large eggs

4 overripe bananas, peeled and mashed into a puree 

1 teaspoon vanilla extract (or the seeds scraped from half a pod)

Preheat the oven to 170c.  Grease a loaf tin, and then line with parchment paper if you feel the need.

Put the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder and soda, salt) in a medium bowl and sift together.  In a large bowl, mix the melted butter and sugar and beat until blended.  Add the eggs one at a time, and then the pulpy mashed bananas, vanilla and booze.  Once a homogeneous mass, add the flour mixture a little at a time until it is blended.  

Scrape the bowl into your loaf pan.  Bake in the centre of the oven for about an hour- a toothpick will come out clean and the house will smell of comfort and calories.  Let cool slightly and serve with a healthy wedge of cream cheese or clotted cream.

Soulfully Spicy Brisket (tacos or otherwise)

Finally!  Some meat!

You were starting to think I dieting on nothing but kale and salads, and a kale salad for when I was feeling indulgent.  Not so!  

While I usually don't cook meat at home, on occasion I will and it's not boneless skinless nothin'.  It's usually something slow-cooked, because that's what I love the most, and it just tastes better when you've put so much time in it.

Brisket is one of my favorite cuts.  The horror of it all:  when I moved to France, I couldn't find it.  They butcher their cows a bit different there.  I had to go to a kosher butcher in Les Marais to acquire my beautiful hunk of pectoral muscle, otherwise, the franco butcher would just shrug and try to sell me on poitrine, which encompasses a much larger area than what I would call brisket.  Tough luck, tender brisket.  

This dish would work nicely for Passover if I ever remember to celebrate, but usually about once a year I'll spend a weekend making a brisket.  I've tweaked and adapted the spices over the years, taking ideas from several sources, but my hat is tipped to Smitten Kitchen on this one, and her's, in turn, to Emierl Legasse. 

  

I do love this spicy though.  Feel free to tone it down if you can't take the heat.  This past incarnation, I found tacos and we quick-pickled some carrots and had a little brisket taco feast, but if you could be arsed to make potatoes and a vege and a yorkshire pud, this would be beyond acceptable Sunday lunch.  

This does take some time.  The brisket needs to rest once it's cooked, and kept in the fridge overnight.  Not only does this make defatting the sauce and the meat loads easier, it makes the meat turn into a tender, flavorful perfectly spicy dish.  While brisket is rarely elegant, this might come close. 

If you have a crock pot (I don't) this would be an easy thing to throw together and forget about.  

I usually make this to feed a crowd, but you can very easily find a smaller brisket and halve the sauce.  Except the garlic.  Keep that full-on I DARE YOU.  

Recipe:  Soulfully Spicy Brisket

serves 8

8 to 10 pound brisket, trimmed of excess fat

3 large onions, sliced

3 tablespoons vegetable oil

6 garlic cloves, peeled and halved

1 teaspoon paprika

2 teaspoons salt

1Tablepoons garlic powder

1 1/4 teaspoons black pepper

1 1/2 teaspoons onion powder

1/4 teaspoon cayenne (adjust to your heat preference)

1/2 teaspoon dried oregano

1/2 teaspoon dried thyme

16 oz (2 cups) beef stock (unsalted or low salt)

8.5 oz (1 cup) ketchup

8.5 oz (1 cup) chili sauce- Sambal Sauce is my go-to.  

200 g (1 cup) brown sugar 

Preheat the oven to 180c/350f

Make your sauce:  Heat a large skillet over medium high heat and sauté onions in vegetable oil, stirring occasionally, until caramelized and most of liquid has evaporated, about 15 minutes. Add halved garlic cloves and saute for 3 minutes more. Stir in spices- paprika, salt, garlic and onion powders, black pepper, cayenne, oregano and thyme- and cook for 2 minutes. Set aside.

In a large bowl, stir together the beef stock, ketchup, chili sauce and brown sugar. 

Place brisket in a baking dish or casserole, spread onion mixture over the top, then pour sauce mixture over the entire dish. Cover tightly with foil bake until very tender but not falling apart, about 3 to 4 hours.

Rest the dish: When the brisket is cooked but still hot, use a spoon to scrape off any large fat deposits adhered to the top and bottom of the brisket.

Once the brisket has cooled a bit, chill the entire dish in the fridge overnight. 

The next day, preheat your oven to 150c/300f. Take the meat out of the fridge.  All those white globs?  use a spoon and scoop them out and discard.  You don't want a greasy oily sauce here.

Scrape the sauce off and transfer the brisket to a cutting board.  Slice into 1/2 inch segments.  Use a wooden spoon to smash up the sauce into a smooth paste- the onions should just kind of be on the verge of dissolving at this point.

Transfer the brisket slices back to the saucy dish. Cover tightly and reheat in the oven until hot and bubbly- about 1/2 hour to 45 minutes.   

To make simple but amazing tacos:  Quick-pickle some carrots while the brisket is having its second turn in the oven.  Place the slices of meat onto a corn or flour tortilla, top with carrots and sprinkle a little coriander on top for an indulgent and grand dinner.   

Boozy Apricot and Sweet Potato cake

Calling anything "boozy" just endears itself to me.  Take this cake for instance.  

I first encountered this recipe, unappetizing titled "Apricot Yam Loaf" from the otherwise wonderful and out of print cookbook from Alice Medrich called "Chocolate and Other Low-Fat Deserts".  Forget the faddy diet gimmick, this book has some real winners of less-than cloyingly sticky sweet sweets.  That cookbook, along with the other couple hundred of cookbooks in my collection, are all in storage.  Many a sleepless nights have been spent digging around the reaches of the internet, looking to see if some food blogger somewhere had republished an old favorite of mine.  Lucky day, a few months ago David Lebowitz republished this oldie but goodie, and I went to work on making it my own again.  

While putting vegetables in sweets is nothing I usually seek out (remember the whole Sneaky Chef feud?), I find that sweet potatoes work well in a cake base.  It lends it a sweetness and earthiness that I find incredibly appealing.  While there is no way no how that I would declare this cake as healthy because of its vegetable content, I would suggest that it was perhaps a better alternative than a plain white flour and sugar cake.  It's worlds more interesting anyway.  

Back in New York, I had a tricked-out gadget-strew kitchen.  Those days are gone now, and my Cuisinart stand mixer and hand-held electric mixers are all tucked away in storage indefinitely.  That doesn't stop me from baking.  I'm low-tech now, refusing help from the machines, and justifying the creations of buttery sugary goodness by the insane beating that I give them beforehand and getting overdeveloped arms because of it.  Don't despair- with a little elbow grease, you will have lump-free fluffy batter as well.  Although you might be a bit crazy to attempt something like meringue without a mixer remember that it was invented long before electric mixers were, and some poor chef at some point would have had to give those egg whites a beating by hand.  I comfort myself with this though halfway through the cake-making process.  

It's also quite a forgiving cake.  The first time I made it, idiot that I am, I forgot to set the time on the oven and left it in 10 minutes longer than I should have.  It was just fine though- the extra moisture from the sweet potatoes and the booze-soaked apricots did a good job to make sure I didn't have to suffer through a hockey puck of cake, and it wasn't even terribly dry.  The second time, I wised up and set the timer and it came out even better!  

You can use leftover roasted sweet potatoes in this dish.  Next time you are roasting them for dinner, throw a couple extras in and behold, you have your base for cake the next day.  Otherwise, you can just microwave them as I did, since I'm lazy.  

The other thing I love about this cake is while it's in the oven, I can sit down and have a nice lunch of the leftover sweet potatoes and drink the apricot-flavored vermouth as a kind of a pre-game.

I've made a few changes, but it is still recognizable as the yam loaf from days of yore.  Oh, and the icing isn't in the original either (hello, low fat cookbook).  Thank M. Lebowitz for that stroke of genius.  Cream cheese frosting tends to make everything spectacularly good.  

The other thing about this cake is that it freezes really well.  We are but two people and an entire cake sitting on the counter leads to unhappy stale cake after a week of sitting out.  No one wants that.  I cut it in half once cooled, wrap half of it tightly in plastic wrap and freezer bags, and then cut the icing in half to compensate.  Sure, you could make the entire batch of icing and frost half the cake with it, but that is so not in the spirit of a low-fat frosted cake.  

Go right ahead.  

I'll be waiting by the phone to hear you say how good it is.  

Recipe: Boozy Apricot and Sweet Potato cake

115g (2/3 cup) diced dried apricots

125ml (1/2 cup) dry vermouth (but I suppose sweet would work as well)

225g(2 cups) flour (I used a combination of white and a light whole wheat)

3/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

75g(6 tablespoons) unsalted butter at room temperature

200g (1 cup) Demerara or Muscovado Sugar

zest of 1 lemon

2 large eggs, at room temperature

240g (1 cup) cooked sweet potato flesh, well mashed or pureed if you have a food processor  

125g(1 cup) toasted almonds, chopped

Frosting:

• 225g (8oz) cream cheese, room temperature
• 60g (1/4 cup) unsalted butter, cubed, at room temperature
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 100 g (3/4 cup) powdered sugar

Do-ahead:  Soak the Apricots in the Vermouth for at least a halfhour.  Overnight wouldn't be overdoing it if you have the foresight.  Drain, reserving the liquid.  DO NOT WASTE BOOZE.  

Preheat the oven to 180c/350f.  Grease 2 8" loaf pans, or whatever cake pan you happen to have.  Mine is kind of a terrine pan, but it somehow manages to do.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, salt, baking soda, and baking powder.

In another bowl (or in a mixer) cream the butter with the sugar and lemon zest until smooth and fluffy. Add the eggs and combine thoroughly. If using a stand mixer, stop the mixer and scrape down the side to make sure everything is incorporated.  If you are doing this by hand, I salute you and your giant guns.  

Mix in half of the flour mixture, then the drained vermouth and sweet potato puree, then the rest of the dry ingredients. Stir in the nuts and apricots.

Divide the batter into the prepared pans, smooth the tops, and bake about 55 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Remove from oven and cool completely.

Once cool, make the cream cheese frosting by beating the cream cheese with the butter and vanilla. Add the powdered sugar, mixing until smooth and lump free. Divide the cream cheese frosting on top of the cakes, spreading it with a knife or spatula.  

Enjoy, it's just lovely with tea.  

Since the recipe makes two loaves, you can freeze a cake.  Wrap it well in plastic once it's cooled.

Kale Curry

I don't know what exactly triggered my vegetarianism.  Honestly, I think it was me trying to be a willful teenager and cause a scene at the dinner table without resorting to doing anything really bad, like drugs of attending back-woods keg parties that end in teen pregnancy.  Refusing animal flesh seemed to be a reasobale and polite alternative to piercings and back-alley stick-and-poke tattos of an angry unicorn or the logo of a terrible band that I liked for five minutes.  It was enough of a disturbance to cuase parental units strife at dinner time, and that was vicotry enough for me.

Once I committed to tofu dogs and soysage, I stuck with it for a good ten years.  At which point, I started to travel and decided that I'd be missing out on life if I didn't indulge in local specialties- Parma ham in Italy, Brauts in Germany, Schnitzel in Austria, Coq a Vin at a farmhouse in France.  Plus, I was getting tired of not being invited out to dinner parties at non-vegetarian's houses.  Bringing your own leftovers to microwave while everyone else eats a beef tenderloin gets old fast, and I got tired of rolling my eyes at every snide carnivorous comment being sent my way.    

I do eat meat on occasion, but I really still prefer vegetables and usually go weeks on a vege diet without even really thinking about it.  I always feel much better on a vege diet- healthier and lighter and more energetic.  It just works for me.

I do get a little help- I get a weekly vege box delivered from a farm in Devon.  It's packed with whatever is seasonal and organic that grows locally.  I love getting this and it motivates me to cook and use up every last onion and purple sprouting broccoli in there in time for the next delivery.  True, in winter time, this means cabbage and spuds and leeks and little else, but if you are going to preach about saving local agriculture and small farms, you better learn to put these veggies to good use.   

A couple weeks ago, my box contained a huge mound of sweet potatoes, bunches of kale and onions.  Sweet potato and kale is one of my favorite combinations.  I got to work and soon had a dashingly good curry on my plate.  True, the final dish won't win any beauty contest, but it's packed with so much vegetable goodness that you feel virtuous and saintly at the end of dinner time.  It's that good for you.  

Thank goodness I got over lousy rubbery meat substitutes in a hurry.  Although, I do love a good homemade veggie burger.  I'll share one with you soon.

The beauty of this health-giving and tasty dish is that it makes a lot, and that lot can be slopped into tuppys at the end of dinner and stacked in the freezer for when you are too busy or lazy to throw something together.  

Recipe: Kale Curry

Serves 4 with leftovers

Adapted from The America's Test Kitchen Complete Vegetarian Cookbook, with some bright ideas from the Cookie and Kate blog.

1½ cups brown rice, rinsed

3 T olive oil, divided
1 onion, chopped, 
32oz (2lbs) sweet potato, peeled and cubed
5 garlic cloves (or more if you you are bold!), minced
2 t fresh ginger, grated
1 t curry power (I went the Indian route, Thai would work as well)
32 oz (2 lbs) kale, stemmed and chopped
8oz (1 c) vegetable broth or stock 
14 oz coconut milk
Lime, for squeezing and garnish
30 g (1/3c) pepitas or other raw seeds
salt and black pepper
red pepper flakes

Cook the rice as whatever the instructions say to on the bag. This usually takes about a  half hour, so you can easily multitask your way into everything being done at the same time.

Heat 2 T of olive oil in a large pot wit a fitted lid over medium heat.  Add the onion and cook, stirring frequently until it is soft and translucent.  Add the sweet potato, cover and cook for about 5 minutes.  Transfer to a large bowl.  Return the pot to the stove.

Heat another T of oil in the pot.  Add the garlic, ginger and curry powder.  Stir constantly for less than a minute, until your nose tells you it's good, and then add half the kale.  Stir, and when the kale wilts down, add the rest of the greens.  Add the broth and coconut milk.  Season with salt and pepper.  Reduce the heat and cover.  Cook for about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the kale is wilted and tender.  Add the sweet potatoes, throw the lid on, and continue to cook for another 10-20 minutes (this kind of depends on the size of your sweet potato cubes, but you want them tender).    

While you are waiting for the sweet potatoes to soften, heat a fry pan over medium low-heat and add the pepitas and seeds.  Keep them moving constantly until they toast up, emit a nutty odor and, in the case of the pepitas anyway, begin to puff up and pop.  This should only take a few minutes.  Set aside.    

Once the sweet potatoes are cooked through, remove the lid and turn the heat up until the sauce is a consistency to your liking, about 2-5 minutes. Stir occasionally to keep the bottom from burning.   

By now, your rice should be done.  Spoon rice into bowls, top with the sweet potato and kale.  Squeeze a bit of lime on top and sprinkle some chili flakes on top, then top the whole mess with the pepitas.  Serve, enjoy, and feel like the virtuous god(dess) you are.

Fig and Goat Cheese Salad

I started seeing figs at the market lately.  They aren't quite the perfect jammy-sweet gems that the coming weeks will bring, but they are perfectly acceptable for a salad or something where you aren't overwhelmed by their mediocrity.  

I must confess though: this isn't necessarily a bad thing.  I've been known to consume a ridiculous amount of figs when they are at their peak of perfection.  It's kind of like the scene in "Coolhand Luke" except with figs instead of hardboiled eggs.  "No woman can eat 50 figs" some hardened criminal will say.  And I will prove them wrong.  Every.  Time.  

I find them an absolute delight in a simple salad.  Here's one that I've adapted (yet again) from Ottolenghi's cookbook "Plenty", which is my go-to for any vegetable recipe lately.  It's just lovely.  Pomegranate Molasses is one of those things I always keep a bottle of around.  It's common in middle eastern recipes and I'm quite in love with it.  It is a concentrated hit of the sweet-sour tang of pomegranate seeds.  It does fantastically as a fruity hit to a salad dressing, but it's also just wicked on lamb or glazed on chicken.  

As for goat cheese, I use a fresher soft one from either Cornwall or Somerset, but you can just as well use one of those pyramids of Cherve if that's what you have on hand.  I dislike goat cheese that are too salty or chalky and aged, but I prefer the soft downy-rind variety with a slightly gooey centre to light up my life.  

Recipe:  Fig and Goat Cheese Salad

Serves 2 Generously as a main

1 shallot, finely chopped

½ tsp mustard or your choosing

2 tsp pomegranate molasses (found in better grocery stores of middle eastern bodegas)

salt and black pepper

3 Tbsp olive oil, plus extra to finish

A couple of handfuls of arugula

a handful of mixed purple and green basil leaves

8 ripe figs, at room temperature

2½ oz young and creamy goat cheese

Make the dressing:  Place the shallot, mustard, olive oil and pomegranate molasses in a jar.  I keep clean jam jars on hand just for this purpose- they are perfect for mixing and serving salad dressings.  Alternatively, you can put this in a bowl and go at it with a whisk. Add some salt and pepper and whisk or shake vigorously until it becomes a homogeneous mixture.  

In a large bowl, add the arugula and basil leaves and drizzle the dressing on top.  Toss gently.

Plate your dressed salad leaves.  Cut the figs into quarters and arrange on top, and dot with bits of the goat cheese.  Season with salt and pepper and serve.

Black Kale and Shallot Salad

I do love a fancy salad as dinner sometimes.  

Not the dreaded health food pile of tasteless greens topped with vinaigrette, but something beautiful and substantial on the plate.  Sure, you still feel virtuous afterwards, but it's more of the soul-satisfying comfort of warm food with sweet and salty crunchy earthiness that makes this salad craveable.    

I got the idea for this salad from the book "One- a Cook and her Cupboard".  I think I was living out of a hotel when I spied it, heavily discounted at a fancy department store.  Books are terrible for people who move around a lot, and cookbooks make little sense to buy if you don't have access to a kitchen, so it was a smart investment all around.  It's a really beautiful book to flip through, but I soon found the reason why it was on the bargain table.  Most of the recipes are quite complicated (some needlessly so) and require oodles of specialty ingredients or equipment, and some of the directions seem quite vague.  Not the easiest thing to digest for a cook with limited means or equipment.  

I spotted a kale salad salad, made some easy modifications and knew it was a winner.  It's quite pretty on the plate and ticks all kind of boxes for me:  it looks like something that took a lot more time than it should, it's pretty to plate, it's vegetarian, warming and satisfying without being too heavy.  A good choice in winter, or a dreary spring day where winter seems closer than summer. 

Recipe:  Black Kale and Shallot Salad

serves 4 to start, 2 for dinner

6 Shallots

a few sprigs of fresh thyme

olive oil, preferably of the extra virgin variety

salt

1 large sweet potato

1 garlic clove

a pinch of brown sugar

45g whole almonds

bunch (about 300g) purple curly kale.  Sure, you could use green, but purple looks dramatic.

1 tbsp butter

Preheat the oven to 180c/355f.

Roast your roots:  Peel and cut the root end off the shallots, leaving whole.  Peel and dice the sweet potato.  Peel and crush the garlic clove.  Put the shallots and sweet potatoes and garlic in a medium pan with a good glug of olive oil, salt, brown sugar and the thyme sprigs, and give it a few turns with a spoon or your hands to coat.  Cover and place in the oven for 30 minutes until the shallots have started to collapse and they start to caramelize.  Take out of the oven and let cool slightly.

Roast your almonds:  on a baking sheet, place almonds in a single layer and place in the oven.  Give the pan a shake after about 2 minutes, and let them roast a few minutes more.  Almonds should be a couple shades darker and be pleasantly fragrant.  Once cool, chop roughly.

Wash the kale and remove and large, tough stems.  Bring a pan of salted water to a boil and cook the kale for about two minutes.  Drain and shock with a rinse in the cold tap.  

Warm the butter over medium heat in a pan.  Add the drained kale, the shallots and potato.  Gently stir to coat with butter and to warm it up, then heap onto plates.  Sprinkle the chopped almonds on top and season to taste.