YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Two Kale Salads

This past Monday we had bookclub at my house, and it was really nice. We read Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi, and ate a whole bunch of delicious things, including a fantastic sweet potato soup (from Amy Chaplin’s Whole Food Cooking Every Day), rainbow carrots and baba ganoush from the West Side market, and Lynne’s fantastic kale salad, which she throws together with tahini dressing and a homemade mix of spiced almonds, sunflower seeds, and pumpkin seeds. One of these days I’ll have to get the recipe, but I can already see her laughing and tossing back her head as she says, oh I don’t know, I just toss it all together! So, at least for now, your guess is as good as mine.
Then there’s this other kale salad, whose source I honestly cannot remember. It is very easy, and quite delicious. The dressing is unusual in that it contains the juice of a whole tomato. And lately there is plenty of kale to go around, so here is something you can do with it:
1. Chop up 1 pound of well-washed and drained kale into small pieces with a knife or a pair of scissors. Place in a medium-large serving bowl. Mix with your hands for a minute or two until the kale leaves begin to soften and turn darker green.
2. Add one-quarter cup raisins, 1/4 cup diced carrots, and 1/4 cup diced red onion to the bowl.
3. Into a high-speed blender, add the juice of 1 lime, 1/4 cup tahini, 1 large tomato, and a few leaves of fresh mint. Blend until liquid, and then pour over the kale mixture. Prior to serving, you can sprinkle a few pumpkin seeds on top, if you’d like.

Enjoy this salad for lunch, or take it to bookclub. It is really yummy.


Gifts from my Family

We receive many different kinds of gifts from our grandparents, whether the ability to identify all the trees in the backyard, or a beribboned stack of letters dating from the early 1900s, or a love of card games, baseball, or building castles on the beach. My family loved to cook and eat. This is certainly my inheritance, and a large part of the reason my family ate little or no ultraprocessed food. To use a product like “Shake ‘n’ Bake” bordered on heresy. I come by my love and celebration of good, real food in the most honest way possible.  Continue reading


YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Two Israeli Fennel Salads

By the time you read this I’ll be in Israel visiting my son and daughter-in-law, and celebrating the first birthday of my beautiful grandson. The next few weeks will be inspired by the delicious meals and celebrations for which Israelis are famous! First up are a couple of salads using the vegetable fennel.  

Fennel is a very special bulb of a vegetable, with the faintest sweet taste of…what?…licorice(!)…but very faint, so don’t be put off. To me it tastes more like the bergamot that gives Earl Grey tea its characteristic flavor and aroma. If you’ve never eaten fennel before, these recipes are a perfect introduction. Continue reading


Salads To Go

Today we are making a trip to visit our family on the East Coast, a trip we’ve made so many times over the decades. But this time it’s for such an extra-special wonderfully-wonderful reason. By the time you read this we’ll be getting dressed for our niece’s wedding! In point of fact the festivities will have begun on Friday night, and that’s why we headed out on on Friday morning.

I used to go over to the Wellness store at work and buy a bunch of snacks for the road. But I didn’t have time yesterday, and anyway those snacks are starting to get a little less inspiring to me than they used to be. I was going to say they’re getting a little stale, but not in the “sell by” sort of way. So i thought I’d try something new — I packed up two salads in Ball jars early this morning, and when we get hungry we’ll empty them out into a couple of bowls, stir, and dig in! Continue reading


YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: French Lentil Salad

If you like lentils as much as I do, this simple recipe is probably looking pretty good to you. I would not have thought of mixing a classic dijon vinaigrette with lentils, but it works oh-so-deliciously. These lentils are exactly the kind of thing I love to find in the refrigerator when I don’t know what I’m looking for. To make this recipe easier (pandemic style), feel free to skip the bay leaf, substitute 1/2 tsp. garlic powder for the garlic, and use some kind of halfway decent Italian dressing instead of the olive oil, vinegar, mustard, and spices. Then if you can get yourself or someone else to peel and slice a carrot and onion, the whole recipe will come together. Good enough. Continue reading


YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: White Bean + Celery Salad with Bonus Recipe for Potato-Celery Soup

You know that feeling when you have no idea what to make, and you look in the refrigerator hoping to be inspired by what you see? This past week I found a huge bunch of celery* from my kids’ weekly CSA (community supported agriculture) box, which they receive year-round in Jerusalem. Celery is in season right now, so I decided that this salad would be a good choice. Notice all the colors and textures that make this dish so pretty and so crunchy.  Continue reading


YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Parsley Salad(s)!

There is an incredibly warm and cozy spot in my heart where the parsley goes. Parsley doesn’t usually get you riled up the same way that basil, thyme, and oregano do, but, if you ask me, it is absolutely its own kind of wonderful. What’s different about these recipes is that the parsley here serves as the green, the herb, the main event, the everything. It’s not a decoration or an herbal sprinkle or a garnish, it’s just the parsley, and it’s definitely meant to be eaten this way. No competition, no second fiddle. Continue reading


YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Summer’s Caramelized Corn Salad

This beautiful and elegant recipe, with its mix of so many different colors and flavors, will certainly make your tastebuds sing! The sweetness from the pepper, sour from the lime, heat from the Sriracha, brightness from the parsley, all come together to form an absolute culinary orchestra. And sauteing the corn in olive oil? Well that’s what gives it that little bit of sweetly caramelized late summer magic. Enjoy! Continue reading


YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Bamboo Rice Salad

Last week, my friend Conner brought me a container of bamboo rice, a short-grain white rice infused with chlorophyll-rich bamboo shoots to turn the rice the color of pale green jade. I had never tasted bamboo rice before, and I wanted to prepare it in a way that decreases the rate of absorption, reducing the glycemic index as it were, so as to decrease the height of the sugar spike that it might cause. Though bamboo rice is not a whole-grain product, the chlorophyll provides a different type of benefit. Continue reading