Kale Salad

I love buying those enormous bags of greens at the grocery store.  It's so much easier than trimming and washing my own, especially on a weeknight.  We eat a ton of veggies around here and I'm always trying to find ways to keep it interesting.  I sauteed up a bunch of kale last night as a side dish, but had some leftover and figured I'd make a salad out of it to go with the flatbread I made for dinner.  It turned out pretty good, so I wanted to share it with you.

 

Inspired by this recipe on food.com 

Ingredients:
1/4 cup golden raisins
2 T dried currants
5 T balsamic vinegar
6 cups chopped kale
1/4 cup lemon juice
2 T olive oil
salt & pepper (to taste, I think I used about 1/2 tsp each)
1 T honey
1 T agave
1/4 cup slivered almonds, toasted

Place raisins & currants into a small bowl and pour balsamic vinegar over them.  Refrigerate for 2-3 hours.
Mix lemon juice, olive oil, salt, pepper, honey & agave together and toss with kale.  Refrigerate for 2-3 hours.
Add the raisins & currants to the kale mixture along with all but 2 T of the balsamic.  Toss along with the almonds.

I really liked the way this came out.  You can absolutely use all honey or all agave, I just happened to only have 1 T of honey in the house, so supplemented with the agave.  I also think other kinds of dried fruits would be good in this as well (cherries, cranberries, etc.).  As I've said before, I don't really like dried fruit but I had raisins leftover from the oatmeal cookies I made a few days ago so I thought I'd give it a whirl.  Soaking them in the balsamic helped plump them up and make them less sticky so they didn't bother me.  Letting the kale sit in the dressing for a few hours softens up the greens a little bit so they're less tough.

Enough of this healthy stuff, where's the pie?
Julie