Still Feeling Peckish

I discovered that my bunny likes kale. Yes of course being a rabbit, he would love vegetables, but we have discovered that not every vegetable is suitable for rabbits. Take the day I decided to share cauliflower stems with him. I use cauliflower a lot in cooking – it is a great substitute for mashed potatoes or fried rice and being a frugal Asian, it goes against the grain to throw any food away. Unfortunately cauliflower pretty much acts like a combustible in rabbit bellies and poor Star had explosive runs for the next few days. Then there was the time that hubs insisted that the rabbit liked bananas. Even I knew that wouldn’t work out and he got the runs again. But lest anyone starts to report us for bunny abuse, let me set the record straight that we give him a good diet of pellets and hay, and all these veggie extras are sort of on occasional treat. Hilariously, Star stays true to form and loves carrots like any self-respecting rabbit – Bugs Bunny had it right there.

The wonderful thing about Singapore which has near zero local agriculture is that we get a huge variety of produce from around the world. I’ve noticed that we get blueberries round the year and decent prices, which I discovered last year while trying to buy up cheap blueberries and freezing them for when the prices went up…then I discovered that the supermarket rotates import so that the prices stay pretty much the same. So I’ve decided to stop hoarding. The other thing I’ve noticed in Singapore is that over the last few years, NTUC Finest has become absolutely stupendous in bringing in less common produce like kale and fennel and parsnips at much more affordable prices and I’ve been pretty pleased to get my “ang moh” (Western style) vegetables easily. So last Saturday during a trot through the Bukit Timah NTUC Finest I discovered a lovely huge bunch of kale for about $5 and instantly grabbed it.

Kale is one of those vegetables which are power packed with antioxidants and iron and vitamins that it features perennially on health food websites. Now I pretty much prefer my vegetables cooked (my Asian belly is used to hot meals, never mind the fact that I live in a scorchingly hot country). So the easiest thing to do with the kale was to throw it into a soup. The soup was made heartier with a spicy sausage – I was really tempted to throw in some beans into the soup but because beans are not that low carb I decided to be a good girl and throw in zucchini instead. 

So the thing about kale is that the stems are pretty tough and unless you feel like working your jaws over a bowl of soup, stripping the leaves off the stalks is a wiser use of the vegetable. So the woody stems (and some of the leaves of course) went to Star the rabbit and they disappeared in double quick time. We were all, human and animal, pleased with this sausage and kale soup. 😁