The OH jokingly said he is going to open up a restaurant called Fad. The idea of this fantasy restaurant is that it serves only the latest food fads – whether it is macaroons, bacon, kale, cupcakes or cake pops! He could be onto something 🙂 people become obsessed by food fads. When I was living in Ireland I was aware that kale was pretty popular among food bloggers in America. I didn’t really realize the extent until I got here. When we go for brunch, no matter where we go (Portland, Vancouver, Seattle) the first thing you smell when you walk in the door is kale! It’s taken over! In Ireland kale, is something that was threatened as a form of punishment when we were kids. Curly kale was a dirty word in our house. It was smelly, old fashioned Irish cabbage that everyone hated. However, now I am a bit older and a little wiser, I decided to jump on the bandwagon and give kale a second chance. To my surprise, it tasted great, and the other day I even began to crave it. So, I bought a big curly head of kale and made some delicious kale chips. For this particular recipe, I went all out and have surrendered to every food fad going – cooking in a muffin tin, kale and the ultimate food fad – bacon. Before you knock it though, try it! It’s a pretty fantastic brunch, and now I can see why this kale trend has lasted so long….Now I just need to convince the OH to start eating kale.

Ingredients

4/ 5 slices of bacon

4 eggs

Olive oil

Salt and pepper

Paprika

Kale Chips

3 big Kale leaves

½ teaspoon of cumin

Salt and pepper

Olive oil

Method

Begin by preheating the oven to 200 C/ 400F . Grease 4 compartments of a muffin tin with olive oil. Wrap a piece of bacon snugly into the muffin tin. Cut off the excess bacon. Use the extra bit of bacon for the bottom of the cup. You basically want a neat cup of bacon with no gaps. Continue to line the other three muffin cups. Place the muffin tin in the preheated oven and precook the bacon for 5 -7 minutes. I left mine for just five minutes, and they could have done with a few minutes more to get a crispier finish.

When the bacon is just beginning to crisp up, remove from the oven. I recommended that you separate the egg whites from the egg yolks, and then carefully put an egg yolk in each of the bacon cups and then tops with the egg white. It’s likely that you won’t need all the egg white, so that’s why it’s better to separate the eggs first. (I learned the hard way 🙂

Once the eggs are in the bacon, place the muffin tin back in the oven and cook for about 15 minutes. It may take less, but you want to make sure the egg whites are firm before removing from the oven. Season with salt, pepper and paprika and serve.

You can cook the kale chips at the same time. For these, I greased another muffin tin with olive oil. I then broke the kale into small pieces and removed the tough inner stem. I placed the kale pieces into a large bowl and coated them with olive oil, and seasoned with salt, pepper and cumin. Place the kale pieces neatly into the muffin tin compartments and cook for about 10 minutes at the same temperature as the eggs.