Sarah Raven's Kitchen and Garden

In the middle of winter I discovered an incredible new plant that’s looked marvellous since July. It’s a pink ornamental kale called ‘Peacock’ – not a cabbage, and that’s the crucial thing – so it doesn’t have big, meaty, monoplane leaves, but fine, highly serrated ones with a greater lightness and elegance than any cabbage has.

All the young leaves are a brilliant purpley-pink, with the more mature foliage surrounding them in a halo of grey-silver. The leaves are highly cut and gently twisted so the overall plant shape is spectacular. There is one down side - the cabbagey smell on a hot day. In the cold, there is no better annual plant. I lined the whole central cutting garden path with it one winter, interspersed with bold clumps of deep crimson ‘Blood Red’ and orange ‘Fireking’ wallflowers, and this part of the garden was almost as colourful from November to April as it is June and July.

This kale could not be easier to grow. I sowed it inside in May, and got fantastic germination. It’s completely hardy and in fact its colour has become a more and more intense magenta as the winter goes on. The plants look unbelievably healthy and don’t get eaten by anything. I stood by my clump for half an hour in the summer watching large cabbage white butterflies trying to land to lay their eggs. Every leaf is so cut and twisted, surprising as it may sound, they can’t find a satisfactorily landing pad, so off they go to un-netted brassicas, or patch of nasturtiums next door.

All though the autumn when there is less and less bright foliage around, I picked the kale to arrange with the orange dahlia ‘Jescott Julie’, with its lovely, ‘Peacock’-matching, pinky-purple reverse to every petal. I cut the individual fronds as near the central trunk as I could get them - picking leaves over a foot long - and then stripped the first two or three inches of leaf from the midrib. Once cut, you don’t want any leaf under the water line or the whole stem rots at twice the speed.

I also picked ‘Peacock’ for my Christmas flower arranging courses, mixing it up in a large turquoise bowl table centre with the brilliant pink, forced Hyacinth ‘Jan Boss’ and I’m picking it now, to put in Moroccan tea glasses on my desk with the first of the almost black, Garden Hybrid Hellebores.

If the kale smells a bit in the garden, you may think it would when cut and bought inside, but as long as it’s not sat too hot, too near a radiator, it doesn’t seem to pong. Any problems, squirt a drop of bleach into the water and the whiff will disappear.

This kale doesn’t make good eating. I’ve tried it and its bitter and tough, like filling your mouth with straw, but there’s another I’ve been growing to look good which I have been picking to eat too. It’s a variety called ‘Red Bor’ whose leaves look like English curly leaved parsley, but in a rich crimson-black. It doesn’t have quite the dazzle of ‘Peacock’ but is statuesque and invaluable for winter. It’s much taller, standing now at over four foot and can have too much bare trunk before the beautiful leaves erupt near the top of the stem, but in the right place, with its legs hidden, I love it.

I cook it mixed up with ‘Red Russian Kale’, a variety I grow lots in the winter and eat almost every day. We eat ‘Red Russian’ raw in winter salads when its leaves are only a couple of inches tall, and grow some plants on to maturity to steam chopped into fine ribbons with olive oil and Soya sauce, and its lovely mixed up with anchovies over pasta.

I like to cook ‘Red Bor’ and ‘Red Russian’, adapting a recipe I’d had using ‘Cavalo Nero’ at the great Amsterdam restaurant De Kas. As a starter for six people, pick about 400 grams of the inner leaves. Remove the tough stalks and then cook the greens until they’re tender in about two litres of water, seasoned with salt and two garlic cloves.

Once cooked, chop the garlic and kale together until you have a fine texture, but not quite a puree. Add half a tablespoon each of chopped capers, gherkins, shallots, black olives and flat leaved parsley and season with salt and pepper. Cut any fresh, good quality, white bread in finger thick slices and drizzle over olive oil. Roast the bread on a medium heated griddle pan until brown and crispy. Lightly scrape one side with fresh garlic and sprinkle with salt. To sweeten it a bit and hold the whole thing together, I add a layer of crème fraiche on the bread before the kale. Finish the crostini with the Cavalo Nero topping and sprinkle with olive oil.