The kale rebellion

I didn't know it would be a mixed marriage.

After all, we agree on most things. Same senses of humor, taste in music, politics.

There's just this vegetable thing.

I love all of them. He doesn't like many of them.

No Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cabbage or cauliflower. No sweet potatoes or cooked spinach. He prefers iceberg lettuce to my romaine, and takes to winter squash like a duck takes to mud.

After years of trying to win him over, after stir-frying and roasting and strewing bits of bacon on things, I've mostly accepted defeat. I make whatever vegetables are seasonal and local, and I make sure there's always salad for him. I look away discreetly when iceberg sneaks into the vegetable drawer.

Then comes kale season. And the real battle begins.

It thrives in the cold

Most of the year, eating local is easy. Spring, summer and fall have bounties of vegetables. Even my nonvegetable husband can find a few things he likes. We're both happy with asparagus in spring and zucchini in summer.

But from January to March, what we have is kale. Bags of it, piles of it, market tables covered with it.

To quote a famous New Yorker cartoon, my husband says kale is just leafy broccoli. And he says to heck with it.

No ruffled green kale, no wide leaves of black kale, not even red kale or purple kale.

Dane Fisher of Fisher Farms loves kale. (And isn't his wife, Maria, the lucky girl?) He was a plant breeder before he became a farmer, and he now collects every edible kale he can find. He planted a dozen kinds this year. He usually has four to eight kinds at his stands at the Matthews and Charlotte regional farmers markets.

Fisher says this has been a great year for kale.

See, kale loves cold weather. Usually, when leafy plants freeze, ice crystals rupture the cell walls, letting liquid leak. When the sun comes out and the plant warms up, it goes limp.

Kale has a natural waxy deposit that keeps its cells from absorbing too much water. Less water means the cells don't rupture when it freezes. In fact, when kale gets cold, its sugar content increases, acting like a natural antifreeze.

With all the cold we've had, Fisher's kale grew a little slower in January. But that's good for kale lovers - it means it will be around even longer this year.

Hear that, honey? Why, we could have kale into April.

It's packed with nutrients

If you only have one vegetable to eat, kale is a good one. It's packed with vitamins A, C and E, folate, calcium, lutein and iron. It's high in fiber, and it has seven times more beta carotene than broccoli. It even has a phytochemical called sulforaphane that may help your body get rid of carcinogens faster.

None of this will do any good if you don't eat it.

There are plenty of ways to do that. You can sauté kale with garlic and red pepper flakes. You can simmer it in soups with cannellini beans and diced potato. It goes great with pasta. You can even chop it up and cook it with cream, like spinach.

When the January freeze wiped out almost everything else, I stocked up on kale. And I set about trying to find a way my husband would eat it.

I made roasted kale, touted by food Web sites as the way to convert kale-haters. He liked the sherry vinegar sauce. He didn't like the kale.

I made kale soup and baked it into an Italian casserole called ribollita. He ate out that night.

I made crispy kale. He wasn't fooled into thinking it was potato chips.

Finally, in the dish I least expected, I found success. I made a Tuscan salad of raw kale tossed with a garlicky lemon dressing. He'll never eat this one, I thought.

He tasted it. He pointed with his fork. Hey, he said. That's pretty good. He even ate a few more bites.

How could anyone prefer raw kale to sweet, melting, roasted kale? He had a theory: Part of what he hates about most vegetables is the smell of them cooking. If it's raw, he doesn't have to smell it. That's why he hates cooked cabbage, but likes coleslaw.

Maybe my husband won't ever become a vegetable lover. But spring will be here soon.

And in the meantime, we'll always have salad.