How To Make Kale And Quinoa Salad

Kale and Quinoa Salad is a delicious and healthy recipe that is easy to make. With kale growing abundantly in our garden we keep looking for good ways to eat it. This salad is good with quinoa and nuts in it.

This is a prism hybrid kale plant but we have made this recipe with other kinds of kale such as Red Winter and Red Russian and it always comes out great. A bunch of kale can look a bit intimidating to deal with. We’ll show you how to cut and tenderize the kale for a good eating experience.

This recipe is naturally gluten free

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The Ingredients For Kale and Quinoa Salad

• 8 Cups packed, Shredded Kale Leaves
• 1 Cup Quinoa
• 2 Cups Chicken Broth
• 3 Garlic Cloves
• Zest of 1 Lemon
• 2 Tbls Lemon Juice
• 2 tsp Dijon Mustard
• 2 tsp Sugar
• 1 tsp Salt
• 1 tsp Black Pepper
• 6 Tbls Oil
• 1 Cup Almonds, Chopped and Toasted
• 1/4 Cup Cilantro
• 1/4 Cup Dill
• 1/4 Red Onion
• 4 oz Feta

Wash the Kale

Our first step is to wash and dry the kale. We’ll rinse it thoroughly with cool water. You don’t need to use really cold water, a cool temperature that feels good on your hands will do nicely. Then we’ll lay the leaves out on a towel to dry.

Cook the Quinoa

While the kale is drying we can start the quinoa. We’ll want to rinse the quinoa first. We put it in a fine mesh strainer and run water over it until the water runs clear.

Cook The Quinoa In Broth

We’ll put our 1 cup of quinoa in a pan with 2 cups of broth, bring it to a boil and then turn down the heat and cook it for 15 minutes. Then we take it off the heat and let it sit, covered for 5 minutes. You can use any kind of broth for this. We like beef or duck broth but chicken broth or turkey broth work just fine. Cooking in broth just adds a lot of flavor to our quinoa.

Let the Quinoa Cool

Since we are putting the quinoa on our salad we need to let it cool. We can cut the kale and make the dressing while our quinoa is cooking and cooling.

Remove the Thick Kale Stems

We want to remove the thick, woody stems from the leaves. These stems are really tough and we don’t want them in our salad. We lay the leaves flat and cut down both sides of the stem.

Chiffonade The Leaves

We’ll stack a couple leaves on top of each other, roll them up tightly and make thin slices perpendicular to the roll. This knife technique is called Chiffonade. You create long thin strands of kale leaf. We want to cut these as thinly as we can to make the salad more tender. We’ll put the cut leaves into a large bowl. If you are unclear about what we are saying here, you can see this process demonstrated about 5 minutes into our video.

Tenderize The Kale

We’ll add a little salt, pepper and oil to our bowl of kale leaves and give at all a good massage. We like the flavor that peanut oil adds to our salad but you can use any kind of oil you want. Sesame oil is another nice flavor. We will work the oil into the leaves with a kind of squeeze and release motion. Then we will let the kale rest for at least 30 minutes while we make the dressing.

Make The Dressing

We’ll start by putting the chopped garlic, lemon zest and lemon juice into a pint jar. We like to use a jar with a lid for this because it is easy to mix the dressing by shaking it. You can do this in a bowl as well if you prefer.

Add The Other Ingredients

Next we’ll add the sugar, Dijon mustard, salt and pepper.

Add the Oil and Mix

Now we will just add the oil and mix the dressing. Again, we are using peanut oil to add the nutty flavor.

Chop the Almonds

We’ll chop our almonds up into pieces by putting them on a cutting board and chopping one direction and then the other with the knife. We want to get moderately small pieces for the most part so we’ll just continue chopping until we achieve that.

Toast The Almonds

Then we will put the almonds in a dry pan over medium-high heat and toast them, stirring frequently. You want to be careful not to burn them so once they heat up you’ll need to keep an eye on them.

Add Herbs To The Kale

While our almonds are heating up we can add our dill and cilantro to the resting kale leaves. We just bunch them up tightly and cut small pieces off with kitchen shears.

Dice the Onion

We’ll just take a few slices off the oniopn and dice them into a fairly small dice. We won’t be cooking the onion so you can decide how much raw onion you want in your salad. We like a small amount but too much gives us heartburn.

Add the Onion to the Kale

We’ll add our diced onion to our kale and herbs

Add the Toasted Almonds to the Kale

When the almonds are smelling toasted we will add them to the bowl of kale. You will see a little darkening but the main way to know they are ready is they will smell like toasted almonds. We’ll just put those right into the salad.

Add Some Feta Cheese

Next we’ll shake some of our crumbled feta cheese into the bowl. We’ll put on about 1/2 cup at this point.

Add Dressing

We will add half the dressing to the salad and massage everything together. You’ll want to get this worked together well at this point.

Add the Quinoa

By now our quinoa will be cooled enough to add to our salad. We will add about half the quinoa and mix that in.

Add More Dressing

Then we’ll add the other half of the quinoa and the rest of the dressing. We’ll get that all mixed together thoroughly.

Add More Feta

Now we’ll add the last of our feta cheese, mix that in and our salad is finished. We serve this as a meal but it could easily be a side dish or first course. It is a lot of steps to make this salad but nothing is terribly difficult and we feel the result is well worth the effort.

Here are some other salad and dressing recipes you can make:

• Kale Caesar Salad
• Classic Caesar Salad
• Bacon Blue Cheese Chopped Wedge Salad
• Green Goddess Salad Dressing
• Wilted Spinach Salad

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