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.