I love broccoli in all ways and means. I also love spinach, but don’t have much experience with kale.
Broccoli first, with spinach as a very close second.
Kale, on the other hand…kinda like Taro, yeah, it’s edible, and gee, it has some nutritional value, but nobody really likes likes it.
Spinach, unless it’s broccoli florets. I can’t stomach the woody stems.
Spinach and Broccoli, raw or cooked, alone or in salad, have been my preferred veggies since childhood.
Love spinach, love broccoli. HATE Kale. So bitter and stringy. Matters what I’m in the mood for at a restaurant. Must say I like raw spinach a bunch more than raw broccoli. Don’t try to serve me raw broccoli with ranch dressing and expect me to think it’s a meal.
Try peeling the stems. I think the heart of the stem might be my favorite part, but the skin can be tough and woody.
As my Mom liked to recite:
Broccoli - while not exocolly -
is within an inich of being spinach.
Broccoli > Spinach (sauteed only, never raw) >>>>> Kale (raw or cooked, but preferably in a soup ).
I like most cruciferous vegetables and broccoli rarely disappoints so that’s an easy #1.
I might prefer spinach from time to time and I actually have some fresh spinach in the house right now. But I don’t care for it raw - that slightly gritty texture from the calcium oxalate crystals doesn’t work for me. So it falls to #2.
Kale is my least favorite leafy green and unfortunately it is kind of chewy not matter what you do to it. I’ll happily eat chard over kale any day. I’ve had edible kale and I’ll eat kale if it is served to me. But I won’t buy it. It’s just inferior in every way except perhaps nutrient-wise and that comes pretty much tail-end on my list of how I choose foods.
You know what’s weird? I don’t mind kale if it’s raw. I won’t go out of my way for kale, but I seem to be one of the few in this thread I started that doesn’t hate it.
Good collards are hard to beat, but I like all 3 with kale being me least favorite.
Olive Garden has a sort of Italian sausage chowder called Zuppe Toscana that’s my go-to soup when we dine there. It features kale in its only edible form.
I love broccoli, roasted (with herbs), steamed (with cheese sauce), raw (with ranch dressing), or baked into a chicken and noodle casserole. Spinach is my choice; there are so many delicious ways to prepare it, but raw and unadorned is perfectly fine.
And another negatory ghost rider to kale.
Either broccoli or spinach. lightly steamed or sauteed with butter and garlic, some lemon or balsamic vinegar and a tiny bit of salt.
I wasn’t thinking balsamic when I replied but that would be great.
I wonder if spinach pizza has fallen out of style. I feel like it used to be more popular but I haven’t seen it in a while, maybe 15 years? When I was a kid, my mom made spinach bread. It’s a loaf of bread stuffed with Italian sausage, mozzarella cheese and spinach puree, pretty much sauceless pizza. It was always a big treat and I haven’t thought about it in decades.
Screw Kale. Honestly, it depends between spinach and broccoli. Like what’s it being served with? If I just had to choose with this limited info, it’d be broccoli.
broccoli the other options are just lawn clippings the health nut propagandists convinced people to eat
Lightly steamed broccoli with a bit of chili sauce is a staple side dish in my house - we have it at least once a week. That said, spinach is a key ingredient of spanakopita, one of the finest foods ever created. So it’s a wash.
I have no use for kale.
Wow, interesting. I wish it tasted bitter to me. It mostly doesn’t have a taste, although I kind of like it raw. Or smothered in cheese and almond slices and mushrooms where it doesn’t matter. It also develops more of a taste if you scorch it in a frying pan. But broccoli rabe puts it utterly to shame and I love it, including the leafy parts. That hybrid stuff that’s crossed with cauliflower and looks like fractal art, that’s also better.
Kale: I’m southern; I suppose it’s a bit like when you have a big effective hammer everything looks like a nail, but, hey, a ham hock added to a batch of kale and cook it until it’s tender makes for a nice mess of greens.
Broccoli.
Kale is one of those vegetables that you chew for half an hour and then realize that was only one forkfull.
That’s the only way I have ever found kale to be even mildly palatable(I’m an old South’un Merlin boy myself). But my grandparents always grew kale, which meant my mother always had it available, and I spent what seemed endless hours chewing that green steel wool.
Broccoli is fine with me - raw, cooked, or anywhere in between.
But spinach is my favorite vegetable, and I could eat it every day. In the decades since I left Maryland I have made stuffed ham a couple of times, but replaced the cattle-fodder-reject that is kale with the food-of-the-gods that is spinach.
That’s because kale is easy to grow and well-nigh indestructible. It doesn’t freeze easily, it’s not bothered by many pests, etc…
Personally I like broccoli, then spinach, then kale last of all. But there are plenty of good kale dishes out there- an example is the kale in this dish:
https://www.blueapron.com/recipes/seared-chicken-mashed-potatoes-with-kale-mushrooms-verjus-sauce
The kale is fantastic. Good enough that we’ve made it many times outside of the chicken and potatoes.