Kale Wraps

So I saw this video on a blog and really liked the idea of using kale leaves to make wraps.

anybody else noticing how Southern Californians are developing Canadian-style Os?

In the video, Margaret from eatnaked.com uses the term "collard greens," which, according to Wikipedia, is technically a category of these big leafy plants, and kale is a member of this category.

Since we're in Brazil, I had to buy the strain of kale available here, which is not the one in the video with the purple stripe down the middle. Alexandre complained that it was a little bitter for a recipe like this, but I'm really inexperienced with buying these kinds of leaves, so I welcome your suggestions on what we could use instead.

Anyway, I took the steaming and cutting techniques used in the video, and built up the filling using a combination of recipes from the internet. Here's what mine ended up like:

 

The ingredients are easily modifiable, but the tip I took away from the various recipes online was to have some kind of topping and then some kind of filling. So the ingredients I used are below. Feel free to just use my recipe as a template; be creative!

Kale Wraps

Ingredients for the filling: 

chicken breasts

chickpeas

avocado (preferably American-style Haas avocado and not Brazilian-style Geada abacate; you can read more here, Ray )

Ingredients for the topping:
tomato
onion
garlic
celery
green pepper

Instructions:

1. Chop up all the veggies for the topping into small pieces. Don't mix them together just yet. At this point, you can also chop up the avocado and wash your chickpeas (or cook them from scratch, if you have time to do that).

2. If you're using chicken, sprinkle your favorite spices onto a chicken breast or two, and fry them (or use your George Foreman Grill, if you've got one and want to avoid all the oil!). Once the chicken is cooked, chop it up into small pieces.

3. Cut and steam the kale leaves according to the video above. To steam mine, I put my metal strainer into a pot of boiling water and put the lid on it! Voilá! Homemade steamer. :)

4. In a nice pan, heat the onion and some salt in a generous amount of oil (olive oil worked well). Then add in the garlic, the celery and the green pepper and heat them up. You can cook the tomato a bit too, if you want; I mixed it in fresh at the end.

5. Mix the ingredients for the filling together and put them into the kale leaves, à lá the video.

6. Set the wraps in a baking dish and top them with the topping mixture (if you had extra chickpeas left over, like I did, you can add those, too).  Bake everything for just a few minutes 5-10 just to warm it all up together.

They're surprisingly filling!


What would you add? Any other ideas for fillings or toppings?