Kale chips are not as good as potato chips.

Is this news to you?

In our quest to make more healthy food choices we have added new items to our lives such as kale, cauliflower, quinoa, flax-seed and heavy cream.  Well, the last one was for new recipes and perhaps doesn't fall under the same category.  ;)

I've made sauteed kale with olive oil and garlic and Katie's Kale Salad.  Those were pretty good, but still kale if you know-what-I-mean.  So last night I decided to try making kale chips.  I was inspired by my friend Ariana who posted a recipe of some chips this week.  Now, she never said they were as good as potato chips, just that they were good.  However, some people on Pinterest posted recipes saying they were as good as potato chips.

Not true.  They are good, and a great healthy alternative but NOT the same as potato chips.  There I said it.  If you want to try it here's what we did:

Ariana's kale recipe (with a couple changes)

• 1 head kale (the curly type is advised), washed and dried
• 2.5 tablespoons olive oil
• LOTS of sea salt for sprinkling (if you use enough it only tastes like salt instead of kale, ha)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 275 degrees.  Remove the ribs from the kale and cut into small pieces (1.5 inches).  Lay on a baking sheet and toss with olive oil and salt.  Bake until crisp, turning the leaves halfway through.  At 20 minutes pull out the dry/crispy pieces and put the wet ones (not cooked all the way yet) for 10'ish more minutes.  Ours baked about 30 minutes total.

Health wise they are a 1000 on the Andi Scale.  Have you heard of the scale?  I hadn't either until my friend Katie (yes, the same Katie from Katie's kale salad) told me about it.  1000 is the top of the scale which looks at the nutrient density in foods.  For example, french fries = 7, salmon = 39 and spinach = 739.  You can't eat all nutrient dense foods at the top of the scale (all leafy greens by the way) because you still need fats to balance out your diet.  So basically I eat some kale chips now and a few of my friend Anne's peanut butter cookies later.  See, it's basic nutrition math. :)