I honestly love it, nothing like being able to eat fresh salads from your own garden in December. But you have to cut it real fine and add other stuff too, like some good diced cooking apples, roasted nuts, etc. I usually also serve it with an applecider-vinegar vinaigrette with honey and good quality olive oil.
Here in the Netherlands it's a traditional winter food, but it's eaten as a "stamppot" (potato mash, one of the many we have) with brown gravy and smoked sausage. We practically never eat it as a salad.
In Denmark we traditionally eat it as 'grønlangkål', which is a sort of butter and cream kale gravy or paste. It pairs really well with ham and potatoes. It's actually a Christmas dish, guess our forefathers were also interested in the lovely kale vitamins but found it a bit too rough as a salad 🙂
Interesting. So instead of spinach a la creme it's kale a la creme. I figure it works better with frozen kale than fresh, as it will have a finer structure.
The Dutch do one thing very well and that's winter food. Probably similar in Danmark, as fellow Northsea coast dwellers.
I had a community garden plot last year, and pretty much everything was harvested and/or dead by the end of October, though I had a few kale seedlings that were previously just getting by in the shade of the other plants. I didn't even bother to harvest them, and i didnt go back to the plot that season. By the middle of December, I got an email that it was time to do the end-of-the-year clean out so they could prep for next year's plot assignments. I went back, expecting to just gather some tools I had stored there, and found my entire plot was kale. I spent hours washing, chopping, and freezing it on sheet trays. After each tray was frozen (much easier to do that in a chest freezer) I bagged it up, and I ate frozen kale for months.
Mustard greens are another one that are amazing for resistance to weather and pests
Yes, I have a plot each year with combined leaf lettuce and kale, and the kale doesn't start to look good until the lettuce is more or less done for the year.