Salad for Dinner

Learning to think of salad as the main meal rather than a side dish is an extremely useful skill.

Dinner!

Rice, corn, and potatoes are the food of the broke, to be sure, but they are also food for working outdoors all day. So when you need to eat enough to feel full but your level of manual labor doesn't justify a heaping plateful of rice, it's time for an enormous salad.

I learned to make this salad from a good friend, and it has gradually become my favorite kale salad of all time. (I'll post my second-favorite next time cottage cheese goes on sale). Kale is a great base for a dinner salad - it's robust and a little crunchy, it's got enough texture to keep things interesting, and it's got one of the best price-to-nutrient ratios in the grocery store. Add its cousin broccoli to the mix, and I could eat this for dinner every night for a week and be happy.  It also introduce me to a brilliant way to handle broccoli stems.

Broccoli stems are the vegetable equivalent of offal - they tend to get passed over or tossed out, but with a little bit of attention, they yield a quantity of delicious, nutritious, and highly edible food.



Ingredients

Half a small bunch of kale. I like the curly kind best for this purpose.
A head of broccoli
An avocado
An apple. A tart, firm-fleshed one is best.

(these are the essential ingredients, you can add other things like sunflower seeds, crumbled cheese, other vegetables chopped very fine)

Instructions

Wash the kale and chop it finely. (This means that you can also use most of the stems, unless they are particularly woody. Put it in your salad bowl.

A trimmed broccoli stem

Wash the broccoli and trim the stem. Depending on how young and tender the broccoli is, the stem usually has a woody, stringy outer layer. Slice that right off. You don't have to be tremendously precise about it. You're just getting it to a point where you can grate the stem. Chop up the broccoli florets nice and small - you don't want to be picking little trees out of the salad. Add the florets to the salad bowl.

You can see how the stringy bits simply won't grate.

Grate the stem into the salad bowl. Anything that's too tough to grate - I usually leave the outer layer on one side of the stem so I have something to hold onto while grating - discard.

The apple I used was a little too sweet and juicy.
See how it's oxidizing already?

Wash the apple, and grate it into the salad bowl.

Dice the avocado, add it to the salad. Toss, dress, and eat.

(As for dressing, you can use any of your favorites. Because this salad is so flavorful on its own, and has a fair degree of moisture from the grated apple and broccoli stem, I usually add no more than olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and salt.)



Cost
Kale: $.40
Apple: $.35
Broccoli: $1
Avocado: $1
Sunflower seeds: $.25
TOTAL: $3
SERVES: 1-2 (as meal), 4-5 (as side)