food to glow

A perfect winter into spring salad for when you are craving fresh, healthy flavours, jewel-like colours and snappy textures. Blood orange, massaged kale (yep, it’s still around!), creamy avocado dressing and toasty, smoky coconut bacon are what you want right now. Vegan and full of nutritious but luxurious tastes.

This is just the sort of the thing I crave as winter elides into spring. It’s not warm enough for “salad-salad” but all of the hot foods – soups, pastas, bakes – are getting old. Even if they are new. Do you know what I mean?

The vegetable section of the supermarkets are really struggling with salad stuff anyway. The rain in Spain has well and truly fallen on the plains in horticultural hotspot Murcia, decimating winter-grown tender crops that we in the UK have grown to expect. No pun intended. I’ve not seen the rationing that was reported recently in the press, but I have seen swathes of empty green crates lining the chilled produce aisle where courgettes, broccoli and lettuce would normally be. It’s like reliving the dreaded, but happily non-event, Millennium bug, but with veg instead of canned goods and bottled water.

This salad, like other salads of mine over the winter months in years past, majors on what we can easily get at its best. Kale is easy to get and at its best right now. Heck, it is growing well in my garden, so mild has been our winter. I love going out in my jammies, scissors in hand, to cut kale for a morning stir fry (yes, I’m a little strange); the proud, swordlike leaves of dusty blue-green a bright beam of interest in an otherwise dull winter vegetable garden. I’m not at all green-thumbed, so if you have a wee patch to pop in a raised bed or till by hand, consider sowing seeds or buying plant plugs when the air is just a little warmer. Here’s an article on the types of kale to grow or look out for at your green grocer.

Blood orange, or blush oranges as they are sometimes coyly called, are one thing we cannot grow here. But the Sicilian imports are still pretty fabulous and go extremely well with kale. Their astringently sweet, raspberry-scented flavour marries so well with bitter flavours that I will be posting an even more unusual recipe that I’ve tested on a loop, and that we love very much. A speedy, healthy, hot supper recipe. Because despite me celebrating spring with a salad, we just know the mild weather can’t last.

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