Green Chips

(Yup, another post today. What can I say? We're having an at home, chill out sort of day. After the morning workout and chores, we've played lots of games, I've spent a good deal of time in the kitchen and now Davan has a friend over to hang. Good stuff.)

Kale chips are, of course, all over in blog land. Lately, though, I've started experimenting with other sorts of leafy green chips because it's a great way to get this sort of stuff in Davan. She puts up with kale fine, but she doesn't exactly seek it out unless it's in chip form.

In fact, earlier this week, I made kale chips and brought them with us for an after Do Jump snack. Davan so enjoyed this that after Do Jump last night, she hopefully asked if I'd brought them again. Alas, no, but it does motivate me to work more into our lives.

We've had collard chips, which are good and crisp up nice and evenly because their so flat. I've done them twice so far and will happily do more.

Today, though, after Davan's hopeful request last night, I decided I'd like to have some green chips with lunch. Having finished off the kale in my smoothie this morning and not having any collard greens in the house, I decided to go out on a limb and try red chard chips.

Now, I haven't even bought red chard for us...perhaps ever, really, but I got some this week, trying to expand my greenery intake. I had it earmarked for a smoothie. Instead, I chipped them up for my kiddo and I to go with lunch today.

I have to say that they turned out really well! Here's lunch for Davan and I today:
We each had a good sized carrot in stick form, 1/2 a yellow bell pepper, 1/2 a bunch of red chard, 1 grape fruit, roughly 1 smallish yukon gold potato, mashed, with a couple ladles of left over Mexican bean soup poured over the time. It was a colorful, delicious and filling lunch!

By the way, I don't own a dehydrator, so I do my green chips in the oven. Here's my method:

Cut the greens to the desired size with kitchen scissors, then wash and spin in a salad spinner.

Lightly spray a cookie sheet. We use canola.

Lay the greens out without overlapping on the cookie sheet. We usually need two sheets to make this work.

Preheat oven to it's lowest setting. For us, that's 170.

Lightly spray the greens with a little Bragg's, then sprinkle with a generous amount of granulated garlic and nutritional yeast.

Bake for about an hour. Smaller pieces will get done first and it's best to take them out as they get done. At this point, I also like to respread the larger pieces if they were overlapped at all, as often happens with the more crinkly greens.

Enjoy!