The Only Actually Good Kale Salad Recipe You Need

For several years of my life, primarily the years when I spent a lot of time on an elliptical machine at the Ernie Davis gym at Syracuse University and centering a not-small percentage of my self-worth around whether I was successful in fitting into a pair of size 8 American Apparel Disco Pants, I had the misconception that in order to lose weight the food I was consuming had to be punishing and not enjoyable. At least, this is how I made peace with consuming mass amounts of things like kale and flavorless quinoa (remember when quinoa was new and interesting to Americans?) and not much else. Some deep-rooted Puritanical ethic inside me believed that if the food I ate was bland enough, cooked with as little fat or oil as possible, and as devoid of joy as I could make it, I must be doing something right, in the misguided pursuit of making myself smaller, until I would disappear.

I regret to inform past me that this philosophy of existence simply doesn’t work. But I didn’t learn this lesson until I ate a lot of horrible kale meals. I didn’t know you could massage kale to make it taste better — I just tore it up, washed it, and threw it into a bowl with vinegar and the smallest amount of olive oil and ate it like that. Awful. Future variations on this theme included sauteeing the kale to make it more palatable and less like eating the worst, thickest leaf you’ve ever seen; wilting it with warm grains; mixing it up in a smoothie with a bunch of other ingredients that mainly tasted “healthy” and “grainy,” which is not what you’d…