Baked Kale Chips

First off, the question is: what is kale? I wasn't too sure when I stumbled upon a baked kale chips recipe on allrecipes.com, but I figured I'd give it a shot because I love chips but was trying to eat healthy while training for a half marathon. Turns out, it's a type of cabbage and looks a little something like this:

Not too appetizing looking when raw, huh?

My cat sniffed it and then left. And that's saying something coming from a cat that eats paper. Yes, my pet has eaten my homework before. No, that excuse does not work on professors.

So the ingredients list is short and the directions are very simple.

Ingredients

1 bunch kale

1 tbs olive oil

1 tsp seasoned salt (I used Tony Chachere's Creole Seasoning)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

2. Remove the leaves from the thick stems and tear into bite size pieces. Wash and dry thoroughly with a salad spinner (I don't have one of those yet so I just dried it with a paper towl). Drizzle kale with olive oil and sprinkle with seasoning salt.

3. Bake until the edges brown but are not burnt, 10 to 15 minutes.

Lessons learned: Spread the kale out in one layer on your baking sheet so that it'll all get crispy. The kale will shrink a lot after baking. Also, watch the time carefully. I only baked mine for 7.5 minutes, but I think it was still overdone. Reading through some of the reviews online, it seems that there's about a 30 second difference between it being done and it being burnt. And mine tasted like super crispy (not crunchy) charcoal, which is super appetizing.

Verdict: I only had time to make one batch so there's still half a thing of kale sitting in my fridge. I'll probably make this again to finish it off and cut down the baking time to see if it tastes better. If it doesn't, then this recipe's out for me.