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.
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. 
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.
Smoky Winter Kale Salad with Cilantro-Avocado Dressing
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.
The Dressing
30 grams (1 loose packed cup) cilantro/leaf and stem coriander, washed and patted dry
1/2 ripe avocado
Juice of 1/2 small lime
3 tbsp best olive oil
3 slices pickled green jalapenos (like you put on nachos), optional
Water to thin to desired consistency
Salt and fresh black pepper
Method: Put all but the water in a blender and pulse until creamy, adding water as needed. It is good for it to be just lighter than heavy/double cream.
The Salad
6-8 leaves of cavolo nero/Tuscan kale/lacinto – washed and ribs removed with a sharp paring knife OR a mix of cavolo nero and purple or green curly kale (I have my own mild cavolo nero and heartier redbore)
1/2 tsp of olive oil
1 avocado, pitted and sliced into large pieces or as you wish
Handful of radishes, topped and tailed then thinly slicecd
2 small blood oranges or best oranges, peeled and segmented, saving any juice to spritz over the salad
Handful of toasted nuts or seeds – I toasted walnuts in a 180C oven for 10 minutes
About a cupped handful of my smoky maple coconut bacon – optional but highly, highly recommended; I’ve got a few people addicted to it 🙂
Method:
1. Stack the de-ribbed kale and slice into thinnish ribbons, or larger pieces like I have cut. Pop these in a bowl and drizzle with the oil. Using your hands, massage until the kale is softened and reduced in volume. This step also makes it sweeter.
Blood Orange Olive Oil from Greybe Fine Olive Products, Scotland
2. Spread the avocado-cilantro dressing on the bottom of a serving bowl and top with the massaged kale and the remaining ingredients. Toss just before serving, spritzing with any residual blood orange juice.
