bender cooking

This is the dish that pushed me to start bender cooking.  After making it for my sister Sarah to rave reviews, I had to send the recipe to my other sister who was also looking for healthy kale meals.  So I decided to start chronicling my food adventures here to avoid having to re-send recipes all the time.

Kale salad is super healthy and easy to make.  I adapted it from a recipe in Saveur’s The New Classics Cookbook, which I highly recommend.  It has lots of great recipes and information.  The biggest adjustment I made was adding grainy mustard to the dressing, an ingredient that wasn’t in the original recipe at all. I think it brings a little more body and adds to the flavor complexity of the dressing.

Ingredients:

• 1 bunch kale, de-stemmed and roughly chopped or torn (about 4-6 packed cups)
• 1/2 cup Orange Juice
• 1 Lemon
• 2 tsp Reduced-Sodium Soy Sauce
• 1 tsp Grainy Mustard
• 1 clove Garlic
• 1/4 cup EVOO
• Salt & Pepper
• 1 Avocado
• Optional: Raw Hemp Seeds

Here’s what I did:

De-stem the kale and place in a large serving bowl. The woody stems don’t taste great and are hard to chew, so just rip them off any kale pieces that are still attached.  They look like this:

Next, make the dressing.  Mince the garlic. Whisk together the garlic, orange juice, soy sauce, juice of the entire lemon and grainy mustard.  Then whisk in the oil, one tablespoon at a time (1/4 cup of EVOO is four tablespoons).

Cut up the avocado into bite-sized pieces and add it to the kale salad. Toss the salad with the dressing and season with salt and pepper.

Plate the salad and top with a small palmful of raw hemp seeds.

A few notes, FYI:

This recipe makes a lot of dressing.  If you’re making a small salad for one or two people, you can save the rest of the dressing for another day, another salad.

Kale and avocado salad is great by itself for lunch or as a side dish.  You can also top it with grilled chicken or shrimp to make it a heartier main course dinner.  This time, we topped with grilled shrimp in lime butter sauce. Get that recipe, here.

Hemp seeds are optional for this dish only because your normal grocery store may not carry them.  You will likely have to go to a specialty store or Whole Foods.  But hemp seeds are awesome as far a nutrition goes.  They are a complete protein, high in essential fats and a great source of vitamins and minerals – a superfood, just like kale.