Raw kale salad with parmesan & hazelnuts

Getting my family together for Christmas these days can be quite a tug-of-war game. None of us have families of our own yet and for the first time in years we are all living in the same country albeit not the same state and yet this was our first together in three years that we’ve all made it home. It’s not that we don’t all love each other because we do and we all love going home- there just always seems be forces standing in the way of us getting together- work, in-laws, lack of holiday or in the case of my sister too many countries to visit.

I have roughly calculated in my non-mathematical brain that during her seven working years my sister has managed to spend four of them on her own sort of self-devised sabbatical. When I figure out how she does this, you can sign me up! At the end of this latest one she’ll even walk away with an MBA from Standford- but though she tells me she lives in Paolo Alto I’m beginning to wonder if that’s just her storage facility for resupplying before hitting the sky-ways again. If she ever stops I expect an enormous carbon-emission cloud to pop up over her head and follow her around like a spurned lover.  At Christmas this year she requested that we all felt sympathetic for her arduous thirty-six hour journey home on four different planes from a trip to London, Paris and Beirut. Sympathy? There are times when I day dream that my parents came to earth as aliens to give birth to my sister before adopting my brother and I. It helps make sense to me some of the delusional ideas that dance around her head and it also excuses the way that my father dances.

My brother, on the other hand is Mr Laidback. God love him, he’s never far from home (or a Lazy-boy) but getting him from his home to the family home is probably held under the same light to him as having a tooth pulled without anaesthisia. So you can imagine my mothers excitement when the three of us plus Don and my brothers girlfriend, Whitney announced that we were all coming home this year. In the last month everytime I spoke to her something was coming out or going into the oven and when I saw how full her fridge and freezer were I knew she had spent a lot of time trying to make this Christmas a filling one if not a perfect one. Or perhaps five mid-twenty-year-olds arriving for the weekend sounded like an army of five-hundred approaching and she thought she better be prepared. We certainly did our best to eat our way through a 22lb turkey a mountain of side dishes, cakes and crumbles and I came home carrying an extra five pounds- sadly in my stomach, not in my suitcase.

Not surprisingly I’ve come home feeling rather full and nothing says detox to me like a bowl full of raw kale for dinner.

I’m guessing that you’re thinking one of two things at this point-  uh, why would I want to eat raw kale (I was once that ignorant skeptic) or you could be that you’re just a little bit curious? I first tried this at a restaurant called Marlow & Son’s in Williamsburg where I pretty much ripped the plate out of the hands of my pregnanat friend. How could raw kale taste so bloody delicious? Well of course it was doused in good extra virgin olive oil and covered in salty little nubs of parmesan- how could it not be good? I’ve lightened my version a little bit adding some lemon juice and reducing the oil and on a whim (crazy gal that I am) I threw in some toasted and carelessly crushed hazelnuts- but really any old nut would do. The most important thing is to use fresh Kale. If you’re thinking that this might be a good way to use up that limp looking bunch thats been hanging around in your vegetable drawer then you will be thoroughly disappointed. It demands fresh crisp leaves and you’ll also want to give them a good wash and dry to avoid bitting into any grit-then you really will think this is a detox recipe.

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Raw kale salad with parmesan & hazelnuts

Based on something I ate at Marlow & Son’s in Brooklyn. This salad is best made fresh.

Serves 4 as a side or 2 if like me you can eat a whole bowl and call it dinner.

Diet facts

8 oz very fresh kale, about 1/2 a bunch (if the leaves are wilting, don’t even think about it)

2 1/2 oz parmesan

1 oz toasted skinned hazelnuts

1 1/2 Tbsp olive oil

1/2 lemon

Maldon sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Prep work

Wash and pull the curly leaves off of the kale and discard the stems. Slice into thin ribbons. Put the parmesan into a food processor and pulse until you have little knobs roughly the size of currants. Very roughly crush the hazelnuts with the palm of your hand or the side of a knife against a chopping board. Juice the 1/2 a lemon.

How to make

Toss all the ingredients together, seasoning with some Maldon salt and freshly ground black pepper  and serve in a nice mound.

Tagged as: Gluten free, Healthy, raw kale salad with parmesan & hazelnuts, salad