Kale salad sounds yummy, and it is! Not many people realise that you can eat kale raw -- without cooking at all! This is a five minute salad that is full of vitamins, nutrients, and personality. It has a variety of lovely colours, nice textures, and is good for any day because kale is always available in the grocery store at very affordable prices - about $2 Canadian for a very large bundle of kale leaves that can feed several adults and children (and we have plenty of it in the summer garden, too). And, if you are like us and have some greens in your refrigerator regularly, then you will see that kale for salad is a nice alternative to regular romaine or head lettuce.
For this recipe you will need the following:
2 cups kale leaves
2 TBSP walnuts, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
a pinch of salt
1 lemon, juiced
4 TBSP olive oil
(the tomatoes in the picture are for garnish)
If you are following a very strict fast, you can omit the oil and use lemon juice with salt and pepper for dressing this salad.
First, remove the stems from the kale. The raw stems are very hard and fibrous and hard to chew. If you want to leave them in, then make sure to chop the stems very fine so they are not too hard to eat. Otherwise, peel the curly leaf away from the stem by grabbing the leaf and ripping up the length of the stem. Create a pile of the leaves.
Cut the kale into thin ribbons. Because the leaves are curly, the ribbons look lovely. If you are using a flat-leaf variety of kale, then you will see a different look. But, it is easy to stack the leaves into one pile and cut across the pile to make the ribbon cut (known as chiffonade). Put the cut kale into a bowl large enough to mix the salad.
Next, crush or chop the walnuts. We like a little more crunch, so we left some of the pieces larger and some smaller. This gave a nice texture to the salad.
Now, prepare the garlic. In order to chop garlic, you want to peel it. The easiest way to peel garlic that will be cut up is to use the side of your knife and a fist. Make a fist with one hand, and with the other, hold the knife sideways on top of the garlic cloves. Now, pound the side of your fist down on the side of knife. Don't be afraid to hit kind of hard as you want to crush the garlic skin. Hit the knife one or two times until you smash the garlic cloves and you see the cloves popping out of the skins. Pull away the paper-like skins and you are ready to chop!
Chop the garlic pretty fine. It is always a shock when biting into a large chunk of garlic, and you want to make sure that there is enough to combine with all the kale. Add the garlic to the mixing bowl.
Now, make the salad dressing. Pour the oil into a bowl. Add the salt and the lemon juice to the oil and mix it together. If you mix vigorously, you will see the dressing begin to emulsify (thicken and stay together). The dressing does not need to be thick, it just needs to be combined well.
Pour the dressing into the mixing bowl. Try to cover all the kale.
Mix the salad well. You want to make sure that all of the kale and all of the nuts are fully coated with the oil-lemon mixture. You will know by how shiny the kale looks. If you have dull areas in the mixing bowl, then you need to mix more or add a little more oil-lemon dressing. The entire salad should be shiny, and as it sits a little, some of the dressing will settle to the bottom of the bowl which gives you one more chance to mix it together before serving.
Garnish the salad as you like. We chose tomatoes because they are simple and this is a salad. Enjoy!
When we tasted this, we thought it was very good. In fact, one of the people who tasted the kale salad gave it a ten out of ten on the scale of foods to eat. Wow! A 10! One person even claimed that the walnuts in the salad were so nice that they reminded him of having a salad with chunks of blue cheese. The sweetness of the nuts with the tartness of the dressing was a refreshing combination. And, the garlic was just enough that it enhanced the dressing rather than interfere with it. Even if we did not have the garlic, this salad would have been delightful! We are definitely keeping this on the list of foods to make in the future!
"God loves each of us as if there is only one of us."
-St. Augustine
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