go back to the beginning … The Original Kale Salad

I shut down my little community garden plot this week, in anticipation of winter and the garden closing date. It’s been a strange year for that plot; a terrible season for tomatoes though my herbs did quite well as did the kale and chard. I didn’t harvest much of the kale over the summer, rather, just left them to grow. And grow. And grow. This week I harvested nearly 4 pounds of beautiful Tuscan kale from plants that were the size of small trees. The leaves were gorgeous – big, dusty dark green, crinkled just so. I brought home a gigantic bag and no real plan. There’s soup and pasta dishes and sautéed batches, of course. And there’s salad. Hmmmm. Kale Salad. Yippee.

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skip the burlap bag … Raw Kale and Roasted Squash Salad

I’ve done it again.  Overscheduled should be my middle name.  In an effort to corral all my lists together, I decided that I needed to work more efficiently and call upon the kindness of friends.  With 12 gingerbread houses looming on my horizon, I needed to make 18 batches of gingerbread pronto.  Listening to my home KitchenAid wheeze and cough on a single batch, I decided to call my friend Alekka and use the giant Hobart mixer in her shop.  Two big batches and 20 minutes later, I was done.  18 nice, tidy, saran wrapped packages carefully placed in a large box.  The trade-off?  Lunch.  Alekka wanted, of all things, lentil salad.  Fair enough.  Except I didn’t make her lentil salad.  I brought her kale and wheatberry salads instead.

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