This is the recipe I always make whenever anyone asks me to make something to bring. Once people have tried it once, they always request that I make it again.
I'll confess, I didn't really come up with this 100% myself. I used to buy those little salad kits from Safeway for lunch, and I particularly hate all of the ones that have chicken in them, because the chicken is cold and reconstituted and tasteless. So I started specifically buying those few salads they made that did not feature chicken.
One of those salads was a kale salad with cranberries and goat cheese and edamame beans, and I eventually started to wonder why I bothered to buy these little salads when I could just buy kale and dried cranberries and the rest and just make a big batch of it for myself for cheap, and then eat a bit of it every day. So I started experimenting with different ingredient combinations, and this is the recipe I've settled on as a good base.
This salad needs no dressing, as it is seasoned a bit already and the ingredients lend their flavor to the whole. You could probably serve it with dressing if you really love salad dressing though, the seasoning is light enough it won't be ruined by it.
Before I start, I'm going to say this now: this salad really needs to be made
ahead of time. At least a few hours, but preferably the day before so it has overnight to sit and give the flavors time to mingle. If you eat it immediately after it's been made, the kale will still be quite bitter because the waxy coating on the leaves hasn't had time to break down or whatever it does when it sits in oil overnight.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
Ingredients:
- Bunch of kale leaves: Get them whole. This is important because you need to remove the tough midrib from each leaf, and the precut kale in a bag doesn't bother to do this and it's terrible. I do not advocate for using organic kale, but sadly my local store stopped selling the non-organic kind in bunches. You can use the really frilly kind if you want, but I find it's more difficult to work with than the lacinato.
- Bunch of chard leaves: Again, get them whole, those midribs are huge. I prefer the red kind because it lends more color to the overall dish and looks nice with the cranberries, but I'll use the white stuff if it's all I can get. Chard isn't strictly necessary, but I like to include it because it lends more variety to the greens.
- 2 carrots: Try to pick ones that are a consistent width all the way down between 3/4 and 1 inch, not too crooked, without any big splits along the side.
- 5 oz bag of Craisins: I usually use original flavor, but tried pomegranate flavored once and got pretty positive feedback. One of these days I'm going to try using pomegranate arils, but little diced-up pieces of green apple could work too, or those canned mandarin orange slices that have had the papery skins removed. Really any kind of very tart fruit, fresh or dried, would work great here. The goal is to have a small but strong burst of sweet/sour.
- ~5oz of slivered, blanched almonds: I usually just grab a single scoop from my local grocery store's bulk section. Thinner slivers of almonds work too, but I find they tend to stick to the sides of the bowl and to each other more than the square-cut slivers. You could also substitute pretty much any other kinds of nuts here, sunflower seeds work really well too. Or leave them out entirely if you're trying to avoid nuts for someone with allergies.
- Garlic-flavored olive oil: Sorry I don't really measure this, I just sorta drizzle some over. Any oil is fine (okay, not sesame oil, the flavor on that is too strong I think, but I've used regular olive oil, canola oil, and grapeseed oil at various times and it turned out fine), it's mainly just to coat the leaves and help the seasonings stick to them, but I find that the garlic flavor adds a little something. I think I also tried using the oil that sun dried tomatoes are packed in once and it was pretty great.
- Salt and pepper: I use kosher salt and very finely ground white pepper, but as long as you're avoiding large chunks of peppercorns this should be okay.
Optional stuff: If you like edamame, get a bag of it from the frozen section and toss some of that in too. They'll thaw while the salad is sitting overnight and they taste pretty great, but I tend to leave them out of my base recipe. Fried pieces of bacon would also be good, and if you like cheese on your salad, toss in some goat cheese crumbles closer to serving time. My base recipe leaves them out so that I can be more inclusive of vegetarians or vegans or people who can't eat soy or cheese for other reasons, but if you can, totally include them.
Try adding in other veggies like bell peppers in step one. Try adding spinach in step two (I'm not sure if they're too fragile and would wilt, but it's worth trying). Try other seasonings like garlic powder or paprika in step three.
Step One: The Mixins
1. Dump cranberries or other fruit item into the bowl (I find that the standard 4-quart pyrex bowl with a snap-on lid is best for this).
2. Dump almonds or other nut item into the bowl.
3. Dump whatever other random stuff you want to add into the bowl (like edamame beans or little cubes of red bell pepper)
4. Peel the two carrots and cut off the ends.
5. Slice the carrots really thin. (I use a mandolin for this. Be super careful not to cut off your fingers by stopping before you get too close to the end, and then just eating the rest of the carrot stub.)
6. Dump carrot slices into the bowl.
Step Two: The Greens
1. Rinse dirt and gross stuff off of kale leaves. Be sure to inspect the undersides of each leaf, because it's not uncommon to find bugs hiding in those little alcoves (especially on the organic stuff), and while I'm fine with the extra protein, finding a bug in the salad tends to have a negative effect on people's appetites.
2. Chop off the bottom part of the leaf, because this is mostly stem and not worth trying to save the little leaf bits clinging to the sides of it.
3. Lay one leaf with the underside facing up, spread it out a bit so you can get to the midrib, and slice the whole midrib out of there, leaving two long thin leaf-halves.
4. Repeat 3 with the rest of the leaves.
5. Line up a pile of these leaf-halves and chop them into thin strips about 1cm wide. If the pieces are too big, the heavier almonds and cranberries will just fall through, leaving half of the people with a plateful of leaves and very little of the more flavorful bits, and the other half of the people with a plateful of almonds and cranberries. If the pieces are too small, I'm worried they'll fall apart during the overnight soaking process, but I have not actually tried this. Might be even better with little tiny kale pieces!
6. Repeat with remaining leaf-halves, then dump them into the bowl.
7. Rinse dirt and gross stuff off of chard leaves. (Be careful with them, they're more fragile.)
8. Do the same removal of the midrib for the chard.
9. Chop the chard into smaller bits. (I find it helpful to slice each half of the chard leaf in half the long way so that I have four equal-width strips, then stack them on top of each other and chop them all at once so the final pieces aren't really long.)
10. Dump the chard bits into the bowl.
Step Three: The Seasoning
1. With your hands (clean, of course, and carefully, so as not to dump bits all over the counter because at this point the salad barely fits in the bowl but you don't own any that are bigger so there's no helping it) mix the contents of the bowl together.
2. Drizzle olive oil over the bowl to coat, then sprinkle a little bit of salt and pepper (finely ground) to season. In this picture I've also thrown in some dried parsley, but I'm pretty sure it disintegrated because I couldn't find any in there later and I certainly couldn't taste it.
3. Mix the contents together again. Try to rub them against each other as you go so that the salt and pepper get mixed in with everything rather than being stuck to whatever pieces were on top at the time. (Note to self: try mixing the salt and pepper with the oil before drizzling it on top to help with this. It works great when I make popcorn!)
4. Stick the bowl (covered) in the fridge and leave it there until the salad is ready to be served. Preferably the next day. A few hours might be enough time if you're suddenly asked to bring your special salad to a potluck and people didn't give you enough advance warning to make it properly. Don't eat it right away, because the raw kale still has that grayish bitter coating on it and doesn't really taste good yet. I guess if you were really in a time crunch, you could try blanching the kale really really quickly in hot water to try to get the coating off the leaves, but if I were in that much of a time crunch, I'd probably just bring something else. Honeyed carrots, perhaps.
5. If you want to add goat cheese crumbles, now's a good time for it. Whether or not you add any final items, you should toss it with some serving tongs or something because the heavier items probably settled to the bottom again as you were driving to wherever you're serving this thing.
6. Eat!
7. If not all of it gets eaten, this salad lasts quite a while longer as leftovers in the fridge, unlike salads made of terrible iceberg lettuce.
