The Hundred Hour Salad

This is the story of  a salad with not-so-humble beginnings. It started one fall when a then-housemate and I were commiserating about how we were sick of the standard Caesar and Beet-Soft Cheese-Candied Nut salads that were populating restaurant menus. Why couldn't we create a dish that had all the components of a great salad, and really tasted like vegetables?

We knew we wanted greens, roasted root veggies, fruit, nuts, and cheese. We rooted through our fridge and came up with kale, beets, sweet potatoes, turnips, brussel sprouts, persimmons, pine nuts, and Parmesan cheese. We set about prepping the veggies and roasting them. I infused an olive oil with rosemary and garlic for the dressing. My friend thought to roast the kale and make them into chips. When it all came together, we had a gigantic roasted veggie salad that was bursting with fall flavors.

We ate it all winter. We made it for Thanksgiving, where it garnered its infamous name after my sister watched agog as we prepared the salad. Just washing, peeling, and chopping the veggies alone took quite some time and labor. My housemate, who is much more meticulous than I am, roasted each vegetable separately, to ensure that the roasting time on each was perfect. My sister was watching my housemate individually grab each kale leaf and dunk it ceremoniously into a large bowl of water to wash it. "What is she doing, baptizing each leaf?!?" my sister whispered to me, horrified. Pretty soon we were all referring to it as "The Hundred Hour Salad."

The salad was an entity, and it kept growing. The medley of vegetables in it was variable, but the number of components seemed to grow with each iteration, as did the time it took to prepare the dish. By the next Thanksgiving, it had been dubbed "The Thousand Hour Salad."

Clearly, the salad had gotten a little out of control. It was also starting to feel too heavy, with so many roasted components. Then I started seeing different versions of a raw kale salad. It's a very simple thing - raw kale with a garlicky, lemony dressing. This was the type of salad I could make regularly on weeknights, which our salad clearly was not.

I tried my hand at combining the best of both worlds, and that's how this salad came to be. It's a raw, pared-down version of the previous incarnation. It is honestly good with just kale and shredded beets, but delicious with a couple of other components, for added complexity. The kale and beets are marinated in the dressing, which softens them up and makes them more palatable to those who are scared of eating them raw.  We'll see what this salad looks like in a few years, because I'm pretty sure I'll still be making some version of it, but for now, I'm pretty happy with where it is. I hope you like it too.

Raw Kale-Beet Salad (formerly The Hundred Hour Salad)

Basics for the salad:

1 large bunch of Lacinato/Dinosaur kale, washed and cut into ribbons

2 medium beets, peeled and shredded

2 carrots, peeled and sliced thin lengthwise

1 Fuyu persimmon, thinly sliced

½ cup pecans, pine nuts, or walnuts

Parmesan cheese, grated

Optional ingredients:

watermelon radish, sliced thin

other winter greens, like escarole

spicy greens, like arugula or pepper cress

croutons, or stale bread, toasted in a pan with some garlic, salt, and pepper

pomegranate seeds

For the dressing:

¼ cup extra virgin olive oil, bonus if you infuse it with rosemary and garlic

⅛ cup lemon juice, freshly squeezed (about half a lemon)

2 teaspoons minced garlic (2-3 medium cloves)

Salt and black pepper

·         Prep the kale and beets first by washing, peeling, and cutting as directed above.

·         Make the dressing by  adding the lemon juice to a bowl, then slowly whisking in the olive oil. Add the minced garlic, ½ teaspoon Kosher salt, and a few grinds of black pepper. Taste and adjust seasonings.

·        Combine a generous amount of the dressing with the kale and beets. (You can keep the beets separate if you are concerned about their color bleeding into the rest of the salad.) Let sit for 20-30 minutes to soften.

·         While marinating, prep the rest of the ingredients. Add to the beet-kale mixture. Toss and add more dressing if necessary.