LENTIL AND KALE SALAD WITH TAHINI SAUCE

This salad is amazing because basically it combines many of THE must-eat-super-food power ingredients everyone tells us we should be eating every day AND it’s really easy to make.

One of my favorite things about it is that you’ll use the entire kale, instead of wasting the stalks.

Ingredients:

(serves 4)


For the salad:

1/2 bunch of kale

1 carrot

450 grams lentils (I used red lentils on this one)

2 tomatoes

1 apple

1 vegetable stock

Cinnamon, cardamom, salt, pepper

For the sauce:

8 tb olive oil

2 tb tahini

Juice of ½ lemon

Salt, pepper

Method:

Rinse the lentils.

Fill a recipient a bit larger than the pan you’ll use to cook the lentils with water and put it on the freezer.

Wash the kale and cut off the leafy part from the stalk (set it aside, you’ll use it as your salad base). Cut the stalks into small 2-3cm bits. Peal the carrot and cut it about the same size as the stalk bits.

 In a pan, place the lentils, kale stalks and carrot. Add water until it covers all ingredients. Add the vegetable stock, cinnamon (1 stick or a pinch of ground), 3 cardamom seeds, and just a touch of salt and pepper.

Cook it for about 12-15min. Red lentils are a bit tricky to cook, because they can easily go from ‘al-dente’ to mashed-potatoes. As soon as the lentils are done, remove the recipient with water from the freezer and place the pan in it. This will stop the cooking process and guarantee crunchy lentils for your salad.

While you wait for lentils to cool, cut the kale leafs into 5-6cm bands (in my case, I mixed the kale leafs with spinach, feel free to add more ingredients as you wish!), slice the tomatoes and the apple and place them on each plate, as the base of your salad.

Prepare the sauce by combining all ingredients.

Once lentils are cool, place them over the salad base and add the sauce.

Delicious, healthy and easy!

>>> Got some lentils left overs? First of all: surprising! ;)

But don’t worry you're not stuck with the same recipe again the next day. Turn you lentils into burgers by mixing them with egg (how many eggs depend on how much lentils you have left. I used 1 egg to make 5 small burguers).

Make thin burguers out of the lentils+egg mix, fry them with just a little bit of oil (about 3-4 minutes each side) and voila! Serve them with salad (always my choice!) or bread.