Soy Sauce & Sesame Oil dressed Kale Salad - Time (20mins) Skill (easy) Eating (medium)

I've got a new carer, a lovely guy called Gary. Who likes to cook. Hurrah! So we did a Japanese/ Oriental feast. This is a leafy greens salad that was part of the feast....

You can make it fresh at the time, or use already cooked leafy green leftovers the next day by adding the marinade dressing.

I used kale, but any leafy greens like chard or savoy cabbage or spinach, that need cooking are great with this.  You can eat it as a warm salad (having just cooked the kale) or a cold salad (from leftovers). It's not as hard to chew as you'd think, so long as it's chopped up into reasonably sized pieces. I ask my carers to chop things into the bite sizes they would for a toddler. Seems to work quite well!

The recipe is adapted from Gabrielle Keng-Peralta's 'The Magic Chopsticks of a Chinese lady from Lyon' which is a brilliant book on making ordinary european meat & veg taste like chinese food.  Her recipe uses this dressing with raw radishes.  I'll add the radish recipe in the summer when I next have some.

What is it? A salad of cooked kale or other green leafy vegetable with a soy sauce & sesame oil dressing.

Time required? 20 mins if you need to boil/steam the kale, 5 mins if you're using already cooked leftovers of kale.

Cooking skill required? Ability to chop then boil/steam the kale (or cabbage), and mix the dressing and then combine it all together. Easy.

Eating ability required? Medium because you do have to chew the kale, but not as much as you'd expect as it's cooked. So easier to eat than coleslaw!

SOY SAUCE & SESAME OIL KALE SALAD

Portion size - serves 4

Ingredients

- Fresh kale or savoy cabbage or other leafy green vegetable - washed. My kale came in a packet that was ready chopped.

For the dressing:
3 tablespoons sugar (soft brown sugar works best but normal white granulated is ok too)
3 tablespoons vinegar (white wine vinegar or rice vinegar is nicest)
4 tablespoons soy sauce
2 teaspoons sesame oil
2 teaspoons vegetable oil (not olive oil.  Use peanut oil if you have it, but normal vegetable cooking oil is fine, I use Lidl Stir Fry Oil cos it has a bit of sesame and ginger in it already).

Optional extras for the dressing:
a toothbrush head sized lump of garlic paste, ie one clove crushed, and/or 
a sprinkling of Chinese 5 spice or Japanese 8 spice


Preparation

1. Wash and chop the kale into bite size pieces.  Add to a pan with an inch or so of boiling water so that it's not covering all the kale, put a lid on the pan and boil/steam for 10 minutes (longer if there's thick stalks).

2. Mix together the dressing ingredients, stirring until all the sugar is dissolved.

(I use a clean jam jar with lid for this, you put the lid on and can shake the dressing ingredients together, also, if you don't use all the dressing, you can then put the jar in the fridge to use again another time for another salad.  It lasts weeks & weeks in the fridge. It will separate and the oil may solidify, but if you take it out of the fridge and reach room temperature before shaking it together, it'll be fine).

3. Once the kale is cooked, drain and put in a bowl. Mix enough of the dressing to cover all the leaves but not to leave it swimming in the dressing.  You can eat it as a warm salad.

4. If you are using leftover kale from something else that's already been cooked, just mix in the dressing with the cold kale and eat as a salad.

Whilst Kale has quite a strong structure, I don't know whether it'll wilt too much by the next day after being dressed. It'll cope better than lettuce would, so something that could be prepared in the morning and eaten for dinner, but, it's probably best to keep the Kale & dressing apart until the day you want to eat it.  The picture was taken 6 hours after the Kale was dressed. It tastes excellent with good structure, but the ends of the stalks have gone brown where the dressing has soaked into them.

Alternatives:

• Raw cucumber sliced or diced.
• Raw radishes sliced or diced (or for a milder flavour you could blanch them - plunge them in boiling water then run cold water over them).
• Carrots, cauliflower or other vegetables - raw if you want to do a lot of chewing, or cooked until 'al dente' (ie still retain a bit of 'bite') before dressing.
• You could also add chopped shallots or parsley or cilantro/coriander or chives to the dressing to change the taste a bit.

Can it be frozen? Not recommended.