Fucking Awesome Raw Kale Salad recipe

Kaley kale kale. I love kale.

This is a recipe I adapted from one I found online. It is my JAM. Some things I do not have exact measurements for, because I usually wing it based on the amount of kale I have left versus the other veggies I add to the salad. Besides what I mentioned, pretty much anything you'd normally put in a salad - tomatoes, celery, red bell pepper, walnuts or pumpkin seeds, whatever - would be good as well.

Fucking Awesome Raw Kale Salad

Ingredients:
Salad:
Several big bunches fresh Kale (any variety)
1 tangerine or orange, peeled, de-seeded and chopped
red onion (adjustable based on your kale/veggie ratio)
red cabbage (sliced thin and chopped)
1 carrot (peel the outer layer and discard, then peel strips for salad using a vegetable peeler or other device)

*Dressing:
1 TBS olive oil
1 TBS balsamic vinegar (use less if making a smaller salad)
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
black pepper (preferably fresh ground) to taste
juice from 1/2 lemon or lime


Slice kale into thin ribbons and put in a bowl big enough to get both hands in. Add olive oil and sea salt, and massage into kale pieces. (No need to be gentle, this is a wilted salad.) Let sit 10-15 minutes.

Chop up remaining veggies. Add to kale after at least 10 minutes, along with remaining dressing items. Mix well and let sit another 10-15 minutes (can cover and put in the fridge if it will be longer.)

CONSUME and ENJOY. (You may feel like a million bucks afterward!)

*You can feel free to adjust the dressing ingredients as you please. The first time I didn't measure my oil and salt and put wayyy too much of both, which I regretted heavily. If you're making a smaller salad, feel free to start with less than the recommended measurements and add more. If you don't have balsamic vinegar, you can use apple cider or rice wine vinegar. And you can adjust the veggies to suit your favorites or however you adjust the dressing.

This salad is the shit. It gets even better the next day, and it's retardedly good for you. You can always add nuts (walnuts or pumpkin seeds) and dried fruit, or even some crumbled goat cheese for more protein/tastyness. If you're not eating kale in your diet (you are doing something wrong, so) try a raw salad on for size. Thanks to the "massaging" with sea salt, the vinegar and the citric acid from the fruit and lemon or lime juice, it starts to break down the cellulose in the kale, taking away the bitterness. Same concept as ceviche.

A whooooole bunch of my friends are on this diet - Tim Ferriss's The Four Hour Body, same guy who wrote The Four Hour Work Week, (the latter which is sitting at this moment on my living room coffee table. Haven't read it yet.) Some of the book, I hear, is kind of out there - cold showers and icepacks and whatnot - but the basic jist is a very basically nutritious diet 6 days out of the week with one cheat day - and no dairy, carbs, and I think fruit during those 6 days... among other things. Annoyingly strict, but yes. Otherwise perhaps the miracle doesn't work. I understand if you really want to shed some pounds - some people do need someone else to tell them what is okay to eat and what isn't. It's a treacherous world out there - fast food drive thrus on every corner and junk food at every checkout. Sometimes it seems to me, more often than not, that those folks who try and "limit" their diet, due to taste or preference or whatever - "I don't like tomatoes" or "I don't eat seafood/red meat/animals" - seem to have either digestive problems or issues with gaining wait easily. It's incredibly easy, if you buy food out at all, to accidentally ingest hundreds of calories you didn't expect to, along with extra fat, sugar, and god knows what else.

It's like I said in my initial nutrition post- and I love that I can use this blog for talking about that - eating a healthy diet is incredibly simple and easy. You just have to simplify it - buy whole foods, fruits and veggies, whole grains, make things from scratch, cut down on the salt, dairy, fat... And that doesn't mean you can't have a cookie every once in awhile. The point of The Four Hour Body book is that you do get a "cheat" day, where you can eat whatever you want. Anything. (My friends literally almost make themselves sick.) And you actually "shock" your body on this day, and it hyper-over-processes itself to get rid of these very literal "poisons." It's a wack concept but it seems to be working. (Good luck with that. )