Super Salad

It was a rainy week in Philadelphia. Everything turned green, including my lunch. Marked as the first week of the 'I need to stop buying so much bread because it's comforting, cheap, hassle free, and relatively skimpy on the plastic packaging' campaign, I tried to make a salad every day out of kale. (It also became a weapon in the 'I love buying Matzos, because it's cheap and makes me feel like I'm not eating bread' war.)

Turns out, kale was a green worthy of the task. Kale: it's pretty high on the super food scale with lots of vitamins (beta carotene, vitamin K, vitamin C, lutein, zeaxanthin -whatever that is), cancer fighting trolls, and all that jazz. You can read about it in it's wiki page. I'll put it nicely and say that it's a 'rugged' or 'hearty' green, and requires a little rough housing before eating. You can cook your kale, for sure, but as the raw-foodists point out, you loose some nutritional value that way. And in today's world of hormone-dosed drinking water, hand-held wireless appendages, and food with 'carrageen' and 'high fructose' wrapped in PVC, you can't afford to leave a cancer-fighting troll behind.

This recipe is pretty hassle free, kind of fun, and really really good for you.

You need:

• Kale (try to buy at a farmer's market, it's only ~$2.50 a bunch, and makes ~5 servings)
• Avocado (try this for yourself, but I think I'd omit it from this salad. I don't think the avocado works well with the vinegar. Maybe replace with some chunks of cheese.)
• Rasins
• Tomatos (not pictured here, was out for the first making of this salad... was definitely IN for the subsequent versions)
• Vinegar (regular white vinegar, try to use a decent brand)
• Coarse sea salt or kosher, whatever salt doesn't have iodine in it. I was fortunate enough to use New Zealand organic sea salt. holler.

Rinse the kale if you care about that sort of thing.

Rip it into bite sized pieces and throw into a bowl.

Pour about 2 capfuls of vinegar onto the kale, and sprinkle two pinches of salt.

Now for the fun part: rub the kale between your fingers, distributing the vinegar while you work. The goal is to break down a the kale a little bit so you don't feel like an animal grazing on wild cabbage. All of your kale should become wet and wilty with this process, so if it's not, add a little more vinegar. I have no idea how long this takes. I want to say a steady 3 minutes. But basically you'll know when the texture goes from squeaky, rubbery, and unruly to wet, wilty, and tender.

Add your choice additives... the good kind, not xanatham or absorbic acid.

Add a drizzle of olive oil.

That's it!

Now you have a delicious, superfood salad. (Uh, well, I added some leftover teff from the Ethiopian... does that count as bread?)

I owe this recipe to the brilliance of my good friend, Alex, who I may or may not be able to coax into guest posting. He's pretty good at rough-housing when it's necessary, which is where the vinegar idea came from. I hope he's not mad that I'm stealing his idea and writing about it. But good ideas need to be shared, right? Anyway, thanks Alex!