This is One Thing, a column with tips on how to live.
Sadly, it’s good to eat more vegetables, a food category that is woefully underconsumed by most Americans. Having a salad along with your “real food” at home is one thing you can do to be marginally healthier, and unlike other healthy habits, like jogging or going to the dentist, it doesn’t actively hurt.
Still, it took me a while to reach a place of gentle truce with the concept of salad. For years, I would buy lettuce, make a single salad, and eat it begrudgingly. Several weeks later, I would throw away a bag of gray-green slime. (And then, much later, I’d throw away the dressing.) The work-to-reward ratio just wasn’t there.
Then, one basic salad broke through.
Everyone hates when all the anecdotes come before the recipe, so I’m going to tell you how to make it, and then take questions afterward:
Get a bag of chopped kale, ideally triple-washed. Or get a bunch of regular kale and wash it. Either way, wash your hands and get the kale in a bowl.
Rip out those thick middle stalks of the kale. (Don’t be a hero here; don’t eat this part.) Then use those clean hands to crunch up—or “muddle”—all that kale.
Pour some white vinegar and olive oil over the leaves.
Salt and pepper that bowl. Mix its contents all about.
At this point, you’ve technically made—and dressed—a salad. You can serve this, and people will be sort of impressed, especially if they have low expectations for you. But from here, you get to play around. Me, I like feta and little tomatoes on there, but whatever you throw on it will be good. Artichoke hearts? Parmesan? Sesame sticks? Extra Parmesan? (Look: You’re eating kale. It would be impossible to make this dish unhealthy.) Even with additions, this salad is … fine. That’s the best any salad can be, really.
And yet, this salad has solved all of my salad problems. You can whip it up so quickly you won’t even have time to ask yourself, Is this worth it? And you probably already have everything but the kale in your kitchen already. As for the kale, in addition to being chock-full of vitamins and fiber, this green is tough enough to stay edible in the fridge for a whole week; the muddling brings it back to “palatable.”
I must now admit that the basics of this recipe came to me in a meal kit a few years back, back when I cycled through box after box of preportioned ingredients, and email address after email address granting me access to discounted trial periods. On one occasion, after throwing away a mountain of packaging, I thought, That salad was easy—I can do that again. And I have. All the time. If I’ve cooked for you since the pandemic, you’ve eaten this salad. It wasn’t the main course, and you probably don’t remember it. But it was healthy.
