Recipe: Sesame Citrus Kale Salad
I have something to admit: I LOVE salads. No lie, I can eat salads all day, erryday (just ask my coworkers). And I’m not talking iceberg lettuce with a single, sad cucumber slice… I mean hefty salads with some serious weight to them. To me, a salad is just leaves unless it has more ingredients than I can count one one hand. This particular dish is one of my top 3 salads of all time. We marry orange vinegar with sesame oil to find blissful matrimony in the dressing, while the rest of the fixin’s support with varied texture and flavor.
Ingredients: baby kale, slivered almonds, green onion, mandarin orange slices, Persian cucumber, avocado, cilantro, furikake seasoning
Some people may call this an “Asian” salad, which is quite an ambiguous name considering the hundreds of different cultures on the world’s biggest continent. If anything, I like to think of this as a quintessential LA salad: we’ve got kale, LA’s most ubiquitous ingredient; Persian cucumbers to represent the huge population of Iranians in Tehrangeles; avocado, our region’s most prized native fruit; cilantro, which was transplanted to North America from Europe (like many LA residents!); and furikake, the miracle seasoning that you can get from Japanese markets all over the city. 
Let me tell you more about the addictive sesame sprinkles you see pictured above. That’s a generous dash of furikake, a Japanese dry seasoning made up of dried fish & seaweed flakes, sesame seeds, sugar, salt, and juuuuuust a bit of MSG. It’s AMAZING on eggs, rice, and really whatever else you can justify… like this salad!
As for the dressing, step away from the olive oil. Instead, use fragrant and delicious sesame oil. It goes wonderfully with this Orange Muscat Champagne Vinegar I found at Trader Joe’s. If you don’t have a TJ’s near you (in which case, I’m so sorry), you can easily replicate the flavor by combining a squeeze of any orange citrus with rice vinegar. All of this with the avocado combines to make an awesomely creamy & refreshing dish.
Toss in some grilled chicken or fried tofu to make this a complete meal!
- 16 ounces of baby kale (or any other green, like baby spinach, butter lettuce, or other kale varietal)
- 2 Persian cucumbers
- 1 Hass avocado
- 2-3 green onion stalks
- 2 Mandarin oranges (or any other orange citrus, like tangerines or satsumas)
- 1 ounce of slivered almonds, toasted
- Handful of cilantro, chopped
- Sprinkling of furikake
- Optional: grilled chicken, tofu, hard-boiled egg, or cooked quinoa to make a filling meal
- 1/3 cup sesame oil
- 3 tbsp. Orange Muscat Champagne vinegar (or equal parts rice vinegar & fresh squeezed orange citrus)
- Salt & pepper (go easy, since there's salt in the furikake!)
- For the dressing: Whisk all ingredients together in a small bowl
- Toast the almonds. (Heat a medium-sized tri-ply frying pan, then add the slivered almonds. Stir or shake the pan every 10-15 seconds to get even toasting on both sides of the almonds. Follow your nose: once you smell toasted nuts, remove the almonds from the pan to keep them from burning.)
- Peel oranges and set aside.
- Slice cucumbers, green onion, avocado, and chop the cilantro. Set all aside.
- In a bowl, combine baby kale with salad dressing by hand, massaging the greens gently to make it tender and more palatable to eat raw.
- Arrange all ingredients on top of the kale, with avocados last.
- Sprinkle furikake on top layer of avocados
- Serve with tongs and enjoy!
- *Feel free to adjust the amounts to taste. If you want your salad more citrusy, increase the orange vinegar; if you want it less oniony, just use one stalk of green onion. With salads, you can customize however you want.
- I always find the best price on sesame oil at my local ethnic food store or Japanese market. While you're there, stock up on furikake, too!
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