A Little Healthy Color: Kale + Beet Salads

Feeling oh-so-grateful this week for an abundance of sunshine and time with my family. Especially since I just finished watching the film Wit, in which Emma Thompson portrays an isolated poetry professor being treated for advanced stage ovarian cancer. Pretty heavy stuff for a Friday night, but the house was quiet and it was just what I needed after a busy week of frolicking and refereeing children. My takeaway from the movie is that in the end, it all boils down to the human connections in our lives helping to prepare us for our ultimate connection with the Creator. Something to consider when we are struggling with the people around us, you know?

Well, moving on to food... lately I haven't done much inspired cooking - more like a bunch of thrown-together meals - but I haven't heard any complaints. No complaints from the big guy, anyway; the girls' nightly dinner complaints are pro forma and I would be highly suspicious if they suddenly began eating their dinner vegetables with a smile. Although there is the exception of kale salad, a favorite of the big girl. And beet salad, a favorite of the little girl. Since both of these vegetables are so exceptionally good for us and seriously delicious, this week I wanted to share our favorite methods for preparing them. Perhaps these dishes might help balance the creamy potato salad and hot dogs that tend to dominate summer meals...

The kale salad below is an adaptation of a recipe Mollie Katzen has on her website. It's kind of a funny story how I ended up on that website in the first place. I'd had a Moosewood cookbook for years (the low-fat one, a giveaway from my mom who said she hated the cookbook, ha!) and I had made nearly everything in it, but somehow I just never heard of Mollie Katzen, one of the founders of the Moosewood collective and a popular vegetarian cookbook author. Then one day I was taking a walk during my lunch hour on the campus of Harvard University, and saw a bunch of people going to this lecture about food so I joined them, and there was Mollie! She had flown in from California to talk with the University community about how to use fresh herbs, and was preparing dishes up on stage, and there was this whole catered lunch that used her recipes...Harvard spends its money in interesting ways sometimes. So I got all pumped up about frying sage and growing lovage, and spent the rest of the afternoon back at my desk, covertly surfing Mollie's website for more recipes.

Sorry no food pics today - just one of those weeks where we were too busy living life to document it much. With the exception of this fellow I recently noticed near one of my favorite kayaking spots:

Old dude of the forest

And this one, taken by big girl:



Lovely surprise perennials at our new house



Tuscan Kale Salad

Take a bunch of kale, any type, and stack the leaves on the cutting board. Slice the leaves into 1/4" shreds, then place in a salad spinner, rinse with water and give them a whirl to dry off. Place in a large bowl.

Take a small piece of bread and toast it, then puree in the processor until you have coarse crumbs. Place the crumbs in a small bowl along with 1/2 cup fresh grated parmesan cheese, 1 pressed garlic clove, 1/4 tsp salt, the juice of 1 lemon, and about 4 T extra virgin olive oil. Mix it all together and using your clean hands (or gloves), massage the crumb-cheese mixture into the kale shreds, making sure they are evenly coated. Taste and add more oil, lemon, cheese or salt if needed. The salad can be eaten at room temp or chilled.

The beet salad is more of a treatment than an actual recipe. At the specialty food store where I work occasionally, we have a salad like this in the deli case and it is seriously popular. I used to bring it home for me and the little girl to devour, then one day I realized it really wasn't such a big deal to cook beets myself. So now anytime I'm in the kitchen making something, I just stick a pot of water on to boil and set the timer for about 40 minutes so a few beets can simmer on the back fo the stove. I find that if I have a container of already cooked beets hanging out in the fridge, I'm much more likely to serve them than if I have to start from scratch.

Beet Salad
Wash several beets and trim their stem to 1 inch. Place beets in a medium-sized pot and fill it with enough water to cover them. Cover the pot, bring water to a boil, then turn heat to low so that it simmers gently. After about 30 minutes, use a fork to stab the largest beet. If it goes all the way through, drain the water and place the beets in a covered glass dish in the refrigerator. Cook for about 10 minutes longer if the beets need more time, then check again.

The salad can be prepared while beets are still hot, in fact the dressing will be absorbed nicely that way, but you can also just take them from the fridge whenever you are ready to make the salad. Either way, you can use your fingers or a vegetable peeler to remove the outer skin. Dishwashing gloves are nice if you don't want pink fingernails. Cut the beets in half, then into slices. Thinly slice a Vidalia onion or half of a yellow onion and place in the bowl with the beets. If you have it, chop up some parsely for a little color.

The dressing is a simple viniagrette. I like to use either apple cider or white wine vinegar (1 part) with extra virgin olive oil (3 parts). A shake of salt and pepper and you are good to go. They are best served at room temp so the oil isn't congealed.