A facebook friend posted that she had a soup recipe that called for kale and she was looking for a substitution since she couldn’t find kale at the grocery store in our Hill Country town. I commented that I had never had any trouble finding kale locally. As far as substitutions, I said that any other green should work in a soup recipe, but that kale was worth looking for since it was a beneficial food for everyone.

By then I was hungry for kale. The next day I was in Wal-Mart, and there in the produce department were beautiful bunches of kale. Of course I bought one.

I soaked a pound of black eyed peas overnight, and yesterday morning I started them cooking on low heat in the crock pot with one chopped up onion and two minced cloves of garlic.

When the black eyed peas were just barely done - about midafternoon - I removed half of them from the crock pot. I tore the leafy part of the kale into bite sized pieces and put them in the crock pot. After turning the heat to high, I let them cook for another hour.

The first thing I noticed was that the house didn’t smell like kale. While I think kale tastes good, it has a bad smell when I cook it by itself. Whether it was the crock pot or cooking it in the black eyed pea broth, I don’t know, but there was no smell.

I gave my Honorable Husband the plain black-eyed peas. He does not like cooked greens. I ate the black eyed peas and kale together and thought it was delicious. I probably should have added a little sauce, but in my opinion this was a good combination. Our Darling Daughter was home for the weekend. She, like her father, prefers raw to cooked greens. But she ate the combination and declared it to be good.

The moral of the story is - there is no end to the ways you can cook beneficial vegetables - and - never underestimate what you might find at Wal-Mart!