3. Avocado Kale Salad

It's a good thing I love veggies.  This avocado kale salad is unabashedly greens and more!

I dislike very few kinds of food.  It makes healthy eating easy and difficult at the same time.  You might think with such eclectic tastes I wouldn't be in the rigmarole that I'm in now.  Despite liking all kinds of good stuff I have a huge weakness for soda pop.  I don't even want to try to count the calories on how much a couple of two liters or a twelve pack of Mountain Dew in cans could add up to.  I didn't drink that every day, but I often did.  I also have a weakness for pizza, greasy foods, and salty snacks.  Sure pizza may not be the worst of junk foods, but the calories add up when I eat a whole large pizza in one sitting.  Quite often an open bag of chips meant an empty bag of chips in the same night.  Sometimes dinner meant a whole box of Kraft macoroni and cheese and a can of peas as a side dish.  Take the sodium content of those two things alone and add a few shakes Lawry's seasoned salt to it, sometimes soy sauce on the peas, and I was giving myself quite a sodium blast.   It's not easy to admit but this wasn't just self indulgence, I really had a death wish.  Because of my depression problems, I knew I was killing myself slowly and I didn't care.  I don't want to go on about my psychological problems too much but they are a factor in all of this.

However, aside from feeling sorry for myself, I also bought into the junk food junkie's cliche's like, "I don't want to live forever if I can't eat what I want whenever I want;"  "There's all kinds of people who smoke, drink, and eat what they want and live to be a hundred;" and "No one tells me what I can or can't eat."  There's much to be said about twentysomething paranoia.  I really thought "they" were out to get me.  Who were they?  A lot of people that really weren't.  I even got into space alien conspiracies, but that's gone now.  Sometimes I still have to take a deep breath and remind myself that recommendations for healthy eating aren't people pushing me around.  Sure, some people are out to make a buck, and they may be full of shit, but some of it is sound advice.  I think it's pretty obvious that fresh vegetables are healthier than cake and ice cream.  I just have to learn how to carefully evaluate the information with reason.  I also come to realize that whether I die tomorrow or sixty years from now it's not about how long I lived so much as it is about how well I lived.  The limits my health puts on my life these past few years and now are heartbreaking to me.  I want to be able to dance again, walk around more, drive, work, and make my own living.  Unemployment and living off the kindness of others may sound like paradise but it's rather undignified.  Being at the mercy of others requires a lot of patience, compromise, forgiveness, and venting misery when no one is looking.  Yet, healthy eating has already improved my daily life and I won't regret that even if I kicked the bucket tomorrow.

  Since I'm not a fussy eater I cannot say these recipes are great for the fussy eater.  I'll try to be nice, but I kind of find fussy eaters annoying so it's hard to be sympathetic to someone who eats like a three year old.  Because I sincerely doubt veggie haters will take exception to my next recipe.  For the rest of us, it's pretty damn tasty!


Avocado Kale Salad
 I took this recipe off of gliving.com.  Here's the link for the recipe there.  Below is my experience making it an eating it.  My recipe has been tweaked from the original. 


Ingredients
1 head of kale, destemmed
2 avocados
1/3 cup lemon juice
2 roma tomatoes
1 12 oz can of bean sprouts (or a handful of fresh mung bean sprouts)
Kosher salt to taste
Cayenne pepper to taste


Kale

I don't think I've ever had kale before.  If I did, it was in something that I was unaware of that had kale as an ingredient.  From what I understand raw kale is not as popular as steamed kale.  Actually, it was kind of difficult to find kale.  I ended up finding it in the organic produce section of one out of four supermarkets I looked.  Not even Trader Joe's in Cleveland had it, but they really don't have a very impressive produce section.

Being a leafy green I figured I'd have to wash it very well for fear of grit, which I've encountered with fresh spinach and other greens.  So I rinsed the stuff thoroughly, ripped the leafy part from the coarse stem, threw out the stems, placed the leaves between two towels, and rolled the towels, setting them aside to dry.  

Tomatoes and Sprouts

Since the recipe calls for me to dice the tomatoes I choose roma tomatoes because I find them the easiest to dice.  Check out my blog entry on tabbouleh to get the details on dicing tomatoes the Kitchen Outlaw way.  Then throw them in a big bowl for mixing.  You want to use the biggest bowl you can for ease of mixing, then transfer them to a smaller bowl for serving and for the sake of room in your fridge. 

The original recipe calls for fresh mung bean sprouts.  I love them.  Sometimes, I buy them, rinse them, and eat them by themselves.  But the three or so grocery stores I went to last week were all out of fresh bean sprouts!  So I figured "What the hell?" and got them in the can.  I opened the can and rinsed them in a colander to rinse away some salt.  I've read in quite a few places that rinsing canned goods will cut the salt content some.  I shook these suckers dry and threw them in the bowl with the tomatoes.  They tasted fine to me.

See, I get to use my lemon juice again and here's the can of bean sprouts.  It may be heresy but I wasn't going to scan the entire city for some fresh bean sprouts!

At this time I unrolled my kale and it was dry.  The rolled towel method gets leafy veggies really dry in ten to fifteen minutes.  I tore them into bite sized pieces and threw them in with the tomatoes and sprouts.  I know this can be tedious but really focus on getting the greens into bite size pieces.  I find most people make salads with big giant greens that fall off the fork or slap you in the face when you fork it into your mouth.  Hey, I have a goatee so cut me some slack!  As I did this I took a taste of the kale.  It's bitter but not as bitter as raw collard greens, which require a little taste acquiring but are good in the long run.  That reminds me of what another one of my hero chefs, Gordon Ramsay tells everyone he instructs in cooking, to taste the food your making.  You need to know what good, fresh, well cooked food tastes like, and you need to know what your serving, even if it's for yourself.

Avocados

The best avocados are the ones that are ripe enough to have a little give to them when you handle them with the skin.  These guys are pear shaped and I cut into them lengthwise until I feel  the pit touch the knife.  I then cut around the pit.  If it's ripe enough it should easily separate into two halves, one with a half pit sized divet and a pit.  I take a spoon and delicately take it out trying not to take any of the "flesh" with it.  The pit might make some good ammo for your table top catapult model, but if you don't have one throw it away.  I then take the spoon and place it as close to the inside of the skin as I can and slowly scoop out the avocado.  If I'm lucky I'll get it out in one piece, but don't worry if you can't just scoop out as much as you can.  When you dump them in the bowl immediately pour 1/3 cup of lemon juice on it.  Lemon or lime juice not only adds good flavor but it also prevents the avocado from oxidizing, which causes discoloration and eventually an unpleasant flavor.

Now, with clean hands, dig in, and mush up the avocados with the rest of the ingredients.  This may be a little tedious if you do it right.  In fact if you don't get a little tired of mashing the avocado chunks into smaller chunks or mush, then you probably half-assed it.  I may be the Kitchen Outlaw, but half-assing a job is even a crime to me.  Now the original recipe doesn't specify how much you should mush it up.  I left some of the avocado in chunks a tiny bit smaller than bit sized for added avocado punch.  So, it's not quite glorified guacamole.   In the photo at the top, you can see the light green chunks.  Now go wash your hands again.

There I go mushing the avocado with my short chubby fingers.  Having over-sized baby hands makes this step in the recipe a little tiring and playing the guitar really difficult.

The Finish

The original recipe calls for sea salt but I have this huge box of kosher salt that seems to keep on giving.  So why waste the money on sea salt when kosher is probably better anyway?  (All hail Alton Brown!)  

Then add some cayenne pepper.  I started with about 1/8 of a teaspoon, then stirred it.  I have a hard time finding the right balance for cayenne pepper.  I used to be a real spicy food nut. The spicier the better and if you didn't like it face melting hot you were a wimp and should  be thrown to the wolves, but that was more raging testosterone and ego than taste.  Well, despite my best efforts, eating super spicy food didn't get me laid and after a while I just wanted to be able to taste food again.  Just the right amount of heat can be enhancing to taste but you don't want it to mask the subtle flavors of the other ingredients.  Otherwise, why cook?  Just drink straight from the bottle and become a hot sauce drunk.

Stir the mixture with a spoon, give it a taste, and add more salt or cayenne if necessary.  The recipe says to serve it immediately but I found it much tastier after it marinaded a while.

Another of my hero chefs, Gordon Ramsay, may be best known for his foul mouth and hot temper, but after watching just about all of his many shows he turns out to be quite dedicated, passionate, compassionate, and a very loving family man.  He's really a good person with no tolerance for bullshit.  Of course he's also a genius when it comes to food preparation and quite mindful of healthy cooking and eating.