Up until this past holiday season I prided myself that I’d never eaten any kale. It just seemed so trendily healthy, and it looked tough and unappetizing. I’d read that you needed to “massage” kale that was being used raw, a recommendation that further discouraged me from trying it. Here’s what the inimitable Deb Perelman said about kale on Smitten Kitchen way back in 2013: ““the world would be a better place if we could all stop pretending that kale tastes good.” But then she went on to rant and rave about a kale salad she’d had at a restaurant. (As has been said, by me and by others, if you can read only one food/cooking blog, read Smitten Kitchen. It is an astonishing phenomenon, 14 years old and still going strong.)
I was pushed into using kale myself for a dinner in December, since I wanted to make something a little different for the salad. I broke down and bought a couple of bunches, and honestly it wasn’t too bad. I’m not saying I became a kale convert, but I liked it better than I had thought I would. It still came across as sort of leathery, though.
Then, somewhere, I ran across a reference to “baby kale,” as in a “baby kale Caesar salad.” I think that’s what it was, anyway. I’ve just spent a totally unjustified amount of time trying to find that reference, but I never did. I didn’t know that there was such a thing. But I found it easily at the regular old grocery store, right next to the baby arugula and spring mix along with an ingredient that I’ve decided not to buy any more unless I have a specific use for all of it right away: baby spinach. That’s just too fragile, wilting away so quickly that I usually end up throwing most of it out. Sometimes I can use a little in a cooked application, but baby spinach turns into slimy fragments when you try to do that. (I might give mature spinach a try at some point, but it seems to come only in enormous containers.) The baby kale appealed to me because I knew it would be sturdier than spinach but my hope was that it would be sweeter and more tender than those honkin’ great leaves of curly kale. And it was! The picture is of the salad I made today for lunch with it, using some sliced apple, walnuts, and blue cheese, topped with some homemade lemon dressing I had in the fridge. The leaves are tender and chewy at the same time, they have a nice mild taste, and they don’t require any prep other than a quick soak and spin in a salad spinner. (Helpful tip: I find that if you leave salad greens in those plastic clamshell containers for any length of time they start wilting and sticking together. Better to dump them out into your salad spinner, quickly fishing out any leaves that are going south, then rolling them up in paper towels and putting them in a plastic bag after you’ve washed them. That paper-towel trick helps keep the greens dry and non-wilted at the same time.)
Any ingredient that encourages us all the eat more salad can’t be bad!
