two salads this week!: all about kale
In atonement for my failure to blog last week, I’m featuring two salads this week!
Ambitious, I know.
Both of these dishes hold a special place in my heart (and are, incidentally, good for the heart) because they incorporate one of my favorite vegetables on Mother Earth, kale.
Kale is this leafy, tough vegetable. It’s slightly bitter to the taste and is even described by some as having a citrusy flavor. You can stir-fry it, bake it (I have yet to make kale chips!), steam it, or just eat it raw, which I’m going to do here because 1. I wasn’t in the mood to dirty and wash a pan (so stir-frying was out of the question), and 2. vegetables can lose some nutritional value in the cooking process: I wanted to pack in as much nutrition as possible.
The first salad I’d like to highlight bears a spooky resemblance to my quinoa salad.
Okay, so maybe spooky isn’t the most appropriate word to use here, but I wanted to go for a dramatic effect. Did it work?
For this salad, I dumped some chopped kale into a bowl and piled the cooked quinoa on top while it was still warm. The warm quinoa helped soften the kale a bit, which was nice, because, as I said earlier, kale is a pretty tough and crunchy vegetable. I also chopped up some red onion, tomatoes, parsley, and added olive oil, salt, crushed black pepper, and lemon juice to taste.
Mm…kale and quinoa make a great pair.
The second salad is one that I whipped up on a whim half an hour before dinner… which actually doesn’t set it apart from most of the other salads I make, but that’s beside the point.
For this salad, I chopped up some red and yellow potatoes and turnip and seasoned them with Lawry’s seasoned salt, crushed black pepper, lemon juice, diced fresh garlic, and olive oil.
I also seasoned some asparagus in the same fashion and popped it all into the oven at 400 F.
Similar to my other kale salad, I started with a bed of raw, yummy kale. After the asparagus finished cooking (note: asparagus cooks faster than potatoes and turnips), I chopped them into smaller pieces and piled them atop the kale to soften it a bit.
Confession: This photograph made me salivate a bit just now.
After the potatoes and turnip finished roasting, I heaped them onto the asparagus and kale. To finish it off, I shredded some cheese on top of it all—because I’m in love with this stuff: its name is rosemary asiago, and it is just divine.
Mix in some olive oil, lemon juice, salt, and crushed black pepper to taste if you wish, and serve warm.
Know what’s neat about both of these salads aside from the fact that they taste great and are great for you?
They keep well in the fridge. In fact, I’m betting the quinoa salad tastes even better the next day after all the flavors have had some time to marinade and blend.
Come to think of it, I have a bowl of that stuff sitting in my fridge right now, waiting to be consumed…
I’d better tend to that now ;)
