Kale Salad: A Love Story

10 years of marriage and cooking + 1 kale salad recipe + 2 celebration-worthy Italian wines

If you had told a younger version of me that one day I’d meet a man who didn’t eat salads, and that I would go on to marry that man, I wouldn’t have believed you.

When I met John, he ate one vegetable: green beans. Though if you asked him, he might have counted the French fries he several times a week with his steak as food category unto itself. When you are moving mountains to bring literacy and gender equality to children in the world’s poorest countries, salads are simply not high on the list of priorities.

John had been living the bachelor life for eleven years at that point, building the global education non-profit Room to Read. His job as founder and CEO would have him on airplanes jetting between fundraising events in London and Tokyo, donor meetings in Hong Kong and New York, and seeing the work across Asia and Africa.

For our first real date I caught him at his home in San Francisco, just off a flight. His house was a drafty two bedroom in the Marina that the owners had kindly rent stabilized as their contribution to John’s do-gooding. John had a fire lit and stuck a bottle of bubbly in the refrigerator. As he rushed to get ready for my arrival, showering and shaving, the razor slipped. Ding-dong. I waited. Ding-dong. He opened the door in a robe, shaving cream splotched across his cheeks, ice pack on his lip trying to stem the bleeding. We both burst out laughing.

He handed me a glass and told me to help myself to the champagne, if I didn’t mind being left alone for a minute while he cleaned himself up. In the kitchen I found the bottle alone in the refrigerator atop a stack of empty shelves with a few sauces tucked into the side door. I knew he was just back from a trip, but I wondered how the man ate. The answer was found on the freezer side: bag upon bag of Trader Joe’s taquitos.

When John finally emerged, he was bashful but smiling, with a large Band-Aid covering the corner of his lower lip. We had dinner reservations at a small, romantic French restaurant that one day we would get to, but not that evening. We ate Thai take out on the floor in front of the fireplace. There were no salads but there was more wine, and a long conversation that lasted well into the night.

Still cooking together 10 years later

The first salad I remember seeing John eat was arugula, dressed simply in lemon and olive oil, with a few curls of Parmesan and some scattered cherry tomatoes. He was eyeing my plate from our bar seats at a restaurant. I told him, ever so casually, to help himself. I feared too much enthusiasm and he would be suspicious, like convincing a small child to eat eggplant (“It’s delicious!”). He pushed the tomatoes to the side and took a modest forkful of leaves. His face lit up. “This is really good!”

Later, he asked if we could make it at home. We did. First arugula salad, with lemon and olive oil, just like the restaurant. Next, we tried spinach, initially topped crumbled goat cheese and crispy pancetta on the theory that cheese and pork fat make most things take better, and later just dressed in balsamic with a scattering of toasted nuts.

Having mastered arugula and spinach, I felt he was ready for the big guns. He was ready for kale.

This was the late aughts and the kale salad trend was inescapable. Restaurants were ditching Romaine, swapping in kale for their Caesars. In the fall there were “harvest salads” with kale, cranberries and pecans, in summer it was kale salad with grilled peaches and ricotta salata.

That kale would take over American salad plates was hardly a given. Raw, it is tough and bitter. It is far from the watery, blank canvas of iceberg lettuce – kale tastes of dense, chlorophyll and nutrient rich leaves. It does not yield softly in the mouth like a leaf of Boston lettuce – kale makes you work for each bite. A successful kale salad cannot be just about the leaf then, but how it interacts with each element on the plate.

As John hung by my elbow in the kitchen, I showed him how to wrap his hand around the stem and pull down to remove the edible leaves off in one swipe. We tore those into bite-sized pieces. While he helped me to wash the leaves and spin them dry, I shared the secrets to transforming this tough bitter vegetable into a lovable starter.

First, even the toughest leaf softens with a bit of acid. Massage in a bit of lemon juice or toss with a vinegar dressing, and after a few minutes the acid starts to breakdown the leaves just enough that they relax, while still retaining a structure that most salad leaves lose when sitting with acid for too long. Second, the bitterness can be balanced with a touch of sweetness. Sweetness can be added as a secondary ingredient, like dried cranberries or fresh peaches, or you can add it in the salad dressing, such as with the syrupy concentration of an aged balsamic. Next, recalling the Parmesan and goat cheese toppings of our early experiments in salad making, I suggested a grating of Pecorino Romano. Cheese brings a layer of salt and umami, that seductive fifth taste. Finally, we added toasted nuts, for textural contrast and crunch.

I don’t remember what kind of nut we added that first time - pine nuts, walnuts, pecans. As kale entered our regular rotation for cooking together, we worked our way through a few varieties before finally settling on the crunchy topping of choice: pumpkin seeds. Since most nuts and seeds taste better toasted, John took the perfection of toasting to a higher level. He experimented dry roasting in pans and with various oven temperatures before settling on a method of oil coated, moderate oven roasting that resulted in the perfect even, golden brown. By that time, our deceptively simple version of kale salad had emerged: kale (any variety), with a garlic and balsamic vinaigrette, tossed with generous amounts of fluffy Pecorino Romano and topped with roasted pumpkin seeds.

Making vows, June 14, 2014

Ten years ago this month, in the backyard of a friend’s house in Aspen, John and I got married. Behind us the creek raged with run-off from an epic winter. We shared vows, both funny and serious. I vowed to always bring him coffee in bed and to let him hit the snooze alarm at least twice. He vowed to take my glasses off when I fell asleep reading. We vowed to keep working together to make the world a more equitable place with our shared passion for education. We promised to keep making kale salad.

In the best marriages, you often hear one person say of the other, “they make me a better person.” Another way of saying it, might be that old nugget of Aristotelian wisdom, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is not unlike, you might say, making kale salad. Ten years of partnership and we soften at the edges. The sharpness of youth gives way to the sweeter side of family life – children, a house, a small garden to tend. Far from boring, you keep things interesting with adventures, close to home or farther away - consider it the umami of life, what makes living taste so damn good. You keep working at it too, finding that better olive oil, perfecting the toasting of pumpkin seeds, because to make a simple thing wonderful requires attention.

Kale salad made alone was good, sometimes even great. Making kale salad together, surrendering a bit of control, allowing another to bring their own ideas and light to the process, the salad becomes something different, and better than you could have imagined.

Still keeping those vows. Raising money for women’s education at the U-Go fundraiser in Singapore, April 2024.

If we have ever had the pleasure of cooking dinner for you in the last ten years, you have probably had the kale salad. Though these days it is not me toasting seeds and grating cheese, it’s John. While he is washing and tearing leaves, I might be searing salmon or seasoning chicken thighs for the oven. It is not my kale salad anymore, it is John’s, or rather ours. Something born of our relationship, nurtured with our love, still growing, still perfecting for ten years of marriage and hopefully many more to come.

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John’s Kale Salad

Serves 4

• 1 bunch kale (green, red, or Lacinato/Tuscan)

• 1 garlic clove, peeled

• 2 T. aged balsamic vinegar

• Salt

• Pepper

• 6 T. extra virgin olive oil

• ¼ cup grapeseed oil

• 1 cup untoasted, hulled pumpkin seeds

• ½ cup grated Pecorino Romano

Preheat oven to 325°F.

Destem the kale and tear leaves into bite-sized pieces. Wash kale and dry thoroughly with a salad spinner or towels. Place dry kale in a large salad bowl.

Lightly crush peeled garlic clove and place in a small bowl with balsamic, ½ tsp salt and ¼ tsp fresh cracked black pepper. Whisk to combine. Add olive oil and let sit for at least 10 minutes before dressing the salad.

Toss grapeseed oil with pumpkin seeds in a small bowl. It will be more oil than you need but you want to mix so that the seeds are evenly coated. Spread oiled seeds out on a rimmed baking sheet. Place in preheated oven. Bake for 30 minutes, taking out to mix every 10 minutes. When seeds are evenly toasted, place in a strainer over a bowl to remove any excess oil. Let cool thoroughly. Sprinkle with fine sea salt and toss. This step calls for more seeds than you actually need, but extras will keep for a week in an airtight container, ready to top more salads or avocado toasts.

Just before dressing the salad, whisk the oil into the vinegar until emulsified. Start dressing the salad with ¼ cup of dressing and toss to coat thoroughly. Taste. Keep adding 1 T. at a time until you reach a desired level of dressing (we like ours very lightly dressed). At this point add the cheese and toss to combine. Taste and adjust seasoning with more salt and pepper if desired. If serving out of the salad bowl, sprinkle ½ cup of toasted pumpkin seeds over the top of the bowl, or plate and top with 2 T. of seeds per plate.

To Drink…

We celebrated our 10-year anniversary in Colorado with a night at the historic Boulderado Hotel, in downtown Boulder. On our way to check-in, we stopped at the Boulder Wine Merchant, easily one of the most interesting wine selections I’ve had the chance to come across. You are just as likely to find a Mondeuse from Sonoma County as you are a Zweigelt rosé from Austria.

I love that in the refrigerated case there was not one mainstream, big-marketing dollar bottle of Champagne. As every celebration deserves some bubbles, we settled on a delightful Alta Langa “MC” from Gabrielle Scaglione in Piedmont. Made the in traditional champagne method (“MC” stands for metodo classico), the blend of chardonnay and pinot nero had the perfect balance of fruit and body, with a fine, persistent bubble. Later we opened a bottle of Petrussa Schioppettino 2021 from Fruili, a rare grape variety and a throwback to a trip where we walked across the border, hiking from Slovenia into the Fruili region of Italy. Both were wines at their best, to celebrate and reminisce, making a new memory along the way.

Unfortunately, neither of these wines are showing on the Boulder Wine Merchant website. You can buy the 2019 Petrussa from Wine.com from $49.99. The Gabrielle Scaglione looks even harder to find, but if you would like to explore sparkling from Piedmont, this metodo classico from Enrico Serafino is a similar blend of grapes scoring 90 points from James Suckling and Wine Enthusiast for only $32.99.