Don't Kale My Vibe

During my vegan phase, I brought a kale salad to my parents' house for a family gathering. It was awful. No one ate it. I think they picked out the cucumbers, tomatoes and other salad fixings and rinsed off the dressing to eat it separately. I still haven't lived it down. Whenever we get together, I'm often mockingly asked if I'm bringing kale salad to the party. After that debacle, I started doing practice runs of all my recipes before I brought it anywhere and haven't tried making a kale salad since.

The other night I didn't feel like cooking and decided to give Whole Foods' salad bar a try. As I collected a hodgepodge of veggies into my cardboard container, I saw some "Garlicky Kale". I threw a few leaves into my box not expecting much of it. When I got home and tried everything I got, I was blown away by the kale and have been thinking about it since!

I found a mock recipe online and, to my delight, I had everything needed in my pantry.

Here's the recipe for Garlicky Kale:

Ingredients:

• 1 bunch of raw kale 
• 2 tbs of tahini
• 2 tbs apple cider vinegar or water
• 2 tbs lemon or lime juice
• 1.5 tbs soy sauce
• 4 tbs nutritional yeast
• 2-3 cloves of garlic

Instructions:
1. Wash, de-stem and dry the kale. Cut into bite-sized pieces.
2. Puree all the ingredients except the kale into a food processor or blender.
3. Pour the dressing over the kale and massage with your hands until all the pieces are coated.
4. Let sit in the fridge for an hour. You could eat right away, but the kale may be a little tough and chewy.

Now, this is a kale salad recipe that will be brought to the next party!

The original recipe can be found here. I made some slight modifications:
1) Increasing the amount of garlic and not mincing them. I just threw the whole, peeled cloves of garlic in the food processor,
2) Using a lime in lieu of a lemon because that's what I had on hand,
3) Reducing the amount of soy sauce, because I found it a little too salty, and
4) Omitting the sesame seeds.



Note from 1/26/2016: You actually don't have to de-stem the kale if you chop it up into small, manageable pieces. I've since stopped de-stemming kale in almost all my recipes!