Another kale salad!?!

January 2021.  A peaceful transition, not.

Hi there. 

I live in Seattle where kale grows all year round.  I plant enough of it to always have it on hand.  Today I have a delicious kale salad to share with you.

A Kale Waldorf!

Kale, honey crisp apples, celery, raisins, walnuts, red onion and a vinaigrette.  Real simple yet, it sends me with every bite.

The KWaldorf sustained me through the insurrection at our US Capitol: the salad and a lot of beer.  Served along side a protein it is a delicious dinner.  I love the crunch of it.  I dice up the ingredients in similar sizes, to allow each bite to have it all.

I honestly believed I was the first person to put these ingredients together and call it a kale waldorf.  I am fucking brilliant, I told myself.  My husband swooned over it and told me he loved me.  We hugged and kissed and wished we had guests to share it with and then I thought, is this an alternative fact?

God damn it. I googled kale waldorf and learned others have eaten, blogged about and shared their recipe for the KW.  It pissed me off so much I've renamed mine, the Kellyanne Kale.  No, I am not giving you my recipe, I've listed the ingredients.

Wait, rewind.  I can not name anything I love Kellyanne and be unforthcoming with facts.  I accept that the kale waldorf was a thing before I discovered my delicious version.  What makes Jenise's Kale Waldorf stand out is the vinaigrette.  The recipes I googled all had either a traditional Waldorf mayonnaise dressing or a vegan dressing of blended cashews.  I recommend the classic dijon mustard, vinegar, olive oil dressing, without garlic, to make the salad divine.  Another tip is to dice up the raisins into the size of a currant so their sweetness doesn't over-power the other flavors. 

One night I served the salad with grilled chicken thighs, Jamaican jerk style.  The spicy chicken, along side the apples and raisins in the salad made a great flavorful match.  Another night I served it with mushroom risotto.  So good!  Both of these combinations are fabulous menu items.

I want to thank my friend Haley for sharing her 2020 morel mushroom haul with me.  I froze the morels last fall and added them to the risotto, along with fresh shiitakes I had on hand.  I didn't use a recipe for my risotto, I've made it so many times.

But please, keep reading for cooking with mushroom ideas!  Below is a friend's musing and writings on pandemic foraging.  The essay is rich with amazing recipes and information on how to forage for  mushrooms. 

First, a few pictures of Haley's haul to wet your appetite.

Read Mushroom Madness and let's look forward to spring! 

Mushroom Madness by Secky Fasicone
1.14.21
As the long pandemic winter of isolation and too-much-cooking slogs forward, my thoughts turn to the
salivating opportunities ahead when we arrive at one of Spring’s best offerings: Mushroom Season! As
the Beginners Guide to Mushroom Hunting suggests, these delectable morsels start appearing in most
regions as early as April and can last well into Fall. There is arguably no better post-Winter cure than
engaging our primal hunter gatherer instincts by tromping through the woods, eyes on the ground,
branches and brambles sticking to our clothes, in search of the often elusive toadstool.
Last Spring, already tired of house bound COVID constraints and not yet aware we were hunkering in for
a long haul, my sister and I explored the woods around the District of Columbia and Maryland and were
rewarded with an amazing trove of morels, considered by many to be the most delicious of the fungi,
and certainly among the most expensive to purchase. Cooking with Morel is fairly easy; in fact these
honeycomb capped mushrooms are best in simple forms that allow their superb and sophisticated flavor
to shine. Who doesn’t love a Risotto alle spugnole, rich with butter and dotted with colorful saffron? Or
a decadent Morel Cream Sauce over linguini, or inside an omelet. Of course purists believe there is only
one way to prepare a morel mushroom: coat in flour and sautee in butter. On the other hand, there is at
least one entire cookbook dedicated to morel mushroom recipes. If you want to wow your brunch
guests (once, you know, we can have guests inside our homes again), try adjusting Ottolenghi's
Asparagus, Mushroom and Poached Egg recipe with morels substituting for portabellas.
But morel reverence, which began for me in Montana where foraging among forests just ravaged by
wildfire is always fruitful, has now been joined by maitake worship. Maitake, which means dancing
mushroom in Japanese and is often referred to as hen-in-the-woods, are found later in the year and
usually at the base of trees, mostly oaks. When my sister and I first began to mushroom hunt, and
despite clear instructions from her woods-savvy spouse, both everything and nothing looked like a
mushroom. Is this one? I’d ask, holding up what turned out to be a rotting clump of old acorns mixed
with dead leaves. Or this? Referring to a mossy mound of lichen. Frustrated, my sister had me watch
this video, huddled in our running clothes, hunched over the Iphone in the woods. Eureka! I looked up
and shouted. Already a disbeliever, my sister barely glanced at first, then joined my excitement at the
massive mound of maitake right in front of our eyes, attached loosely to a dying oak stump. Before we
left the Maryland woods that day we picked so many massive clumps of maitakes that we had to
remove our outer clothing and use it as carry bags.
That first night, as we gently cleaned and prepped our fungal find, we made Melissa Clark’s delicious
Mushroom Bourguignon. The next night we tried this Wild Mushroom and Arugula Pizza recipe. Later
that week we leaned on our hometown Philadelphia restaurant Vedge for their Seared Maitakes in Leek
Remoulade inspiration.
Of course there is much more to mushrooms than foraging, cooking and eating. Many folks argue the
nutritional value of mushrooms. Others swear to the medicinal benefits of a fungal diet. And for my
experience with magic mushrooms, well that’s a different blog. Meanwhile, back to happy dancing with
thoughts of maitakes and morels come spring.