How to Make Ballin' Kale Chips

Now that we've got a kid, the desire is upon us to Get Healthy. At 9.5 months, our boy is crawling everywhere, which means we're dashing after him everywhere to stop him from getting into things he shouldn't get into but which we haven't figured out how to babyproof yet. Like All the Books. Where do you put All the Books when you live in an apartment?

But soon he'll be walking, then running, then... And we want to encourage him to be healthy and active and fit. But if we ourselves aren't modeling that behavior, well, good luck to us.

Part of our attempt to Get Healthy is by enjoying healthier snacks. So while I was at Costco the other day, I stumbled upon a 1.5lbs bag of organic mixed baby kale for $4.99. 1.5lbs of kale is roughly the size of my husband's torso or the cat when she's laying like monorail cat or a large throw pillow. Big. And if there's one thing I love about kale, it's that you can turn it into chips.

I went online and found a recipe. 3 ingredients, super simple. Olive oil, sea salt, kale. Then I started reading the comments where a few people noted that they'd used cooking spray in lieu of the olive oil and that they'd turned out great. So for my first batch of kale chips I used olive oil cooking spray and sea salt. They were pretty good! The next batch I tried butter cooking spray and sea salt. They were less good, but still pretty okay. They stayed mushier than the olive oil spray, even after baking them for longer.

For my third batch I used real, legit olive oil and sea salt. I don't know why I let those fools preaching cooking spray talk me out of using real, honest-to-goodness olive oil. Because these kale chips are ballin! They're a tiny bit sweet, they're incredibly crunchy... they're perfect. We just sat down at the table and started chowing. Even the 9.5 month old seems to prefer these kale chips, because he was eating them so quickly that he cut his lip. This seems like something only I'd be able to accomplish, but apparently accident-prone is hereditary.

Now. On to one of the easiest snacks of all time.

Preheat your oven to 350. I've been doing a middle oven rack for these.

Take a dark, metal baking pan with raised edges and cram as much kale on there as you can. Don't worry about having a single layer or anything like that, just give yourself a nice blanket of kale. Mine usually comes up to about an inch or so above the pan's edge. As they cook they're going to shrink considerably.

Now. Olive oil. I put my thumb over the mouth of my organic olive oil so that just a drizzle would come out and gave myself what I would consider to be about a teaspoon or so of olive oil. Start small -- you can always add more later. You want your leaves to have a nice, light coating of oil. The key word is light. Toss your kale around with your hands to ensure that you've got an even distribution of oil all over. Sprinkle with sea salt -- however much to your taste.

Once your oven's good n' hot, put in the chips. I don't know if it's necessary, but I've been pulling them out every five minutes or so to toss them around a bit. You do what you want to do. Depending on how much kale you put on your pan, you'll want to let these bake for about 12-15 minutes. Keep an eye on them, because they can go from crispy to dry, brown horribleness within a minute or two. You'll know they're done when you go to toss them around and find, to your surprise, that they're magically crunchy all of a sudden.

And there you go! Put them in a bowl and eat away. The torso-sized bag of kale at Costco is roughly 6 batches of kale chips. So for $4.99 you're making yourself several days of snacks -- healthy snacks -- for almost no effort. Go! Make kale chips.