A salad should be a celebration.
This has been a heavy week, friends - on this blog (grief and job loss and rhymes-with-yahtzee…oh my), in the news, maybe in your personal life or that of someone close to you. And so, for my Friday “Fare Well” post, I’d like to keep things a little lighter:
A salad.
At any given dinner party (or brunch), I can usually be relied upon to volunteer a kale salad. As a yoga teacher and health coach, this is pretty on-brand; the truth is, I really do LOVE kale. And I’d like to persuade you to love it, too.
If you want to love kale, it’s my opinion that you need to show it a little affection first. This week’s food post is less a recipe than a process. Maybe think of this salad prep as a little bonus mindfulness content; a kitchen meditation.
You’ll need:
A bunch of kale
Dressing ingredients (oil, lemon, salt, pepper, herbs)
Something sweet/fruity (apple, blueberries, dried fruit…)
Something crunchy (pepitas, hazelnuts, croutons)
A roasted fall vegetable (sweet potato, beets, winter squash)
Some protein (tofu, beans, turkey, salmon)
Anything else that calls to you from your refrigerator!
Think painterly: if my salad were art, what colors and textures could I add?
Step 1: Get yourself a bunch of kale, not a chopped bag. The chopped bags seem convenient, but the problem is that they usually include lots of stems, tough and unfriendly to eat, and are chopped almost small enough, but not quite.
Step 2: Separate the stems from the kale. This just takes a few seconds and yields a pile of leafy greens alongside a pile of woody bits. The stems you can use in soup, or compost, or snack on if you’re hard-core like that. The leaves are what you want here.
Step 3: Wash the leaves. Immerse them in a bowl of cold water, swirl them around a bit. Nothing ruins a nice salad like mouth full of dirt or sand. When they’re clean, grab the leaves a handful at a time and wring out any excess water (or use a salad spinner if you’re fancy.)
Step 4: Chop the kale. You want it pretty small here. There’s a whole post I’ve yet to write about those impossible-to-eat restaurant salads with leaves the size of your head that really only work if you’re an actual dinosaur. Let’s try for something you can fit on a fork.
Step 5: Dressing! For a bunch of kale, you’ll want approximately:
2 T mild-tasting oil (avocado is great; olive oil if you don’t mind a little bitterness)
Juice of 1 lemon
1/2 t salt
1/4 t pepper
Herbs of your choice (I love a good Swiss herb blend; anything you like, including garlic/oregano/basil/parsley, would be nice. If you have some fresh herbs, even better.)
Mix up your dressing and pour it on the greens.
Step 6: Give it a massage. This is the big “secret” to a great kale salad: break down those cell walls a little, leaving it nice and relaxed.
If you’ve read this far, a little story-as-salad-metaphor:
Thursday was my weekly baking day. Once a week, my kitchen becomes a cottage bakery and I set aside everything else to crank out sourdough and gluten-free goodies. This week I asked my dad if he’d like a loaf, and he requested “a half a loaf of sandwich bread…I can’t eat a whole loaf” [pause] “but…like, a Yiddish half, more of a 5/8 loaf than a 3/8 loaf.” “Yiddish” being my dad’s shorthand for: make it kosher, a little generous, worthy of a Shabbos table, not just the secondhand crumbs.
As it happens, this about describes how I like my salad: sure, it’s on the lighter side, but also…it should be worthy of the dinner table, celebratory and substantial, not some sad shreds of iceberg with a half-ripe tomato wedge and some bottled French dressing. And so:
Step 7: Assemble your salad. This “recipe” is good for about three salads, give or take. Start with a handful of dressed greens and then play - make something beautiful! Find colors and textures that you like. I recommend something fruity, something crunchy, a little protein, a fall veg. Below, I’ve got an apple, some roasted sweet potato (because I had some left over from soup last week), a little BBQ tofu, some pepitas (because I put pumpkin seeds on everything), the last of a jar of castelvetrano olives, and a little shredded smoked cheddar. But truly: add whatever you like, just make it a celebration and not a chore.
Step 8: Enjoy! Pairs well with autumn sunlight, good company, and/or a substantial portion of fresh-baked bread.
Below: audio version of this post + recipe PDF
Recipe:
Post audio: