Having just returned from a post-Christmas, pre-January-panic holiday in Paris, I’m feeling a little starved of vegetables.  They don’t really serve vegetables as part of a main dish there, nor can you order vegetables as a side dish (or maybe you can but it’s not on the menu), so after three days and four nights of eating omelettes, roast meat and mashed potatoes, Sebastian and I have been feeling a little heavy.  Inevitably, my diet whilst in Paris was less varied than it would be home; rather than trying to explain what coeliac disease is to every blank -faced waiter, I opted to use my chef training and general restaurant-going experience to make educated guesses about the potential wheat content of my potential dinner (I chose roasted meat instead of anything pan fried which might have been coated in flour first; chose the salmon tartar instead of the fish bisque, a jus rather than a thickened sauce, etc).  This went well, but it did mean that I ate a lot of salmon sashimi at lunch times (Paris: great place for sushi… Who knew?) and a lot of red meat at dinner and not much else.

I returned a couple of days ago, at dinner time. Of course, the fridge was devoid of food so I nipped out to the shops to buy something I could make quickly.  Before, I would’ve immediately opted for pasta, which is obviously off the menu now.  I was thinking wistfully about my courgette and bacon pasta dish as I stood in the grocers staring at kale, when it occurred to me that this celebrity vegetable, crisped in the oven, would be a great replacement for pasta, in this instance anyway.

And I was right!  I’d bought extra courgettes (about four large ones) than I usually would but otherwise the quantities stayed exactly the same as they would have been were I making it as a pasta dish with actual pasta (so feel free to ignore the kale part and use corn pasta or whatever in it’s place).  First I fried six rashers of streaky bacon on a very low heat: this is how you get it to go really crispy.  Once they were dark brown and dramatically shrunken I drained the rashers on kitchen roll.  I turned up the heat on my frying pan a little and fried about four cloves of sliced garlic and half a chopped, fresh, red chilli (you can use more or less chilli depending on your tastes) until the garlic just started to colour.  Then I added my courgettes which I had washed, halved lengthways and sliced into semi-circles.

I fired the courgettes on a high heat until they were cooked through and golden brown.

Then to the kale:  I spread the kale out evenly in a large roasting pan (if you pile it in, it was go soft, not crispy) and lightly drizzled olive oil over it with plenty of salt and pepper.  I cooked the kale for literally three minutes in an oven heated to 180°C.  And this is what I got…

So that was it.  I added lots of freshly grated Parmesan and the crispy bacon to the courgettes and then topped my bowl of kale with the sauce.

I’d made Sebastian pasta, which was once my favourite thing, but as he sat next to me, enjoying his supper, I wasn’t the slightest bit jealous!  Whatever, eat your pasta, I have kale crisps and they are excellent.