Garlicky purple kale tossed into pasta with cherry tomatoes and feta cheese. This is a light, fresh pasta dinner full of nutritious ingredients and Mediterranean flavors. It’s the perfect recipe to enjoy this vibrant and nutritious leaf, but you can easily swap in other varieties of kale if you need to.

Kale comes in purple! Who knew?

Purple kale is a ruffly curly leaf which has shades of both purple and green. It’s rather beautiful, as you can see, and it slots in nicely anywhere you’d normally use green kale. It’s flavorful is pretty comparable. Earthy, chewy, and substantial.

In this recipe, we make a simple pasta recipe that little bit more visually appealing, so it’s an easy win if you want something novel and interesting to serve guests but don’t have a lot of time.

The kale is cooked in garlic with cherry tomatoes and a little bit of wine, so it’s extra juicy tasty. There’s a great variety of textures with the chewy kale, juicy tomatoes, and creamy feta. And I really can’t get over how colorful it is. I mean, just look…

But most of all, it’s just a delicious, easy and healthy dinner with very few ingredients. And we all need more of those in our lives.

So if you can’t get any purple kale, just swap in green and try it anyway.

How to make it in 30 minutes – in pictures

Full printable recipe card coming right at you, but here’s the visual run through which you may find useful to browse first.

Gathering and prepping your ingredients. If you have everything prepped and ready, it can all cook in the time it takes the pasta to boil.
The kale gets a little head start cooking before the tomatoes go in.
And once the kale and tomatoes are cooked, the other bits go in the pan while you wait for the pasta to be finished and drained.
Then it all gets tossed together…
Ready to serve!

Other recipe ideas for your purple kale

If purple kale is something you have in abundance (lucky you!), I have some other ideas too. These recipes all call for green kale but I think the purple would swap in beautifully:

Purple Kale & Cherry Tomato Pasta

Garlicky purple kale tossed into pasta with cherry tomatoes and feta cheese. This is a light, fresh pasta dinner full of nutritious ingredients and Mediterranean flavors. It's the perfect recipe to enjoy this vibrant and nutritious leaf, but you can easily swap in other varieties of kale if you need to.
4.52 from 27 ratings

Ingredients

  • Olive oil
  • 6 cloves of garlic, minced
  • 200 g (7 oz) purple kale, washed and roughly chopped
  • 400 g (14 oz) cherry tomatoes, halved
  • 2 Tbsp white wine
  • 175 g (6 oz) feta cheese, crumbled
  • 300 g (11 oz) linguine
  • Handful of basil

Instructions 

  • Start your pasta cooking, according to package instructions.
  • Gently heat some olive oil in a large, deep saucepan – just enough to coat the bottom.
  • Saute your purple kale and garlic for a couple of minutes, just until the garlic is fragrant and the kale starts to reduce. If the garlic sticks to the bottom, just add a little bit of the wine to get it unstuck.
  • Add the cherry tomatoes and continue to saute until the tomatoes just start to release their juices and the kale is softened. I don’t like to let the tomatoes break down too much but you can cook them down a little more if you prefer. Season with salt and pepper as desired.
  • Pour the wine into the pan. Let it bubble up and mix into the kale and tomatoes.
  • Turn off the heat. Add the basil and most of the feta cheese (save a little for topping each serving) to the the top of the pan. Don’t bother mixing it in yet, just let it sit, covered, until the pasta is ready.
  • Once the pasta is finished cooking, reserve a little bit of the cooking water and then drain the pasta and add it to the pan with the kale, tomatoes, basil and feta. Toss to combine all the ingredients and let the feta start to melt in a little. Stir in a bit of the pasta cooking water if it feels too dry.
  • Serve up in bowls, topped with a little scattering of feta cheese on top.
Serving: 1g, Calories: 341kcal, Carbohydrates: 34g, Protein: 13g, Fat: 18g, Saturated Fat: 8g, Polyunsaturated Fat: 9g, Cholesterol: 39mg, Sodium: 428mg, Fiber: 5g, Sugar: 6g