I love salads, no matter what the weather outside is like. Sunny, windy or snowing – give me a good salad, and I am happy! Salad does not mean a pile of greens and a boring dressing (although, as a side, I do enjoy this type of salad too), salad can be exciting and full of different flavors and textures.
One of my favorite greens are kale, and I have already shared an amazing warm kale and chickpea salad with you. Here comes another one, also very winter-appropriate, featuring sweet potatoes and load of other delicious good-for-you ingredients.
I always like to make sure I eat as many colorful foods throughout the day as possible. The colors in different plants are different phytonutrients – natural chemicals that help our bodies to fight diseases and stay healthy, and let’s be honest – they just taste amazing. In this salad pretty much all the colors are covered – kale for green, sweet potatoes for orange/yellow, red onion and pomegranate for red, apple for white and black beans, you guessed it, for black – so I can peacefully eat white bread for the rest of the day. Just in case – the last part about white bread was a joke. After a lunch that healthy, I always feel so good that I never crave anything unhealthy.
Kale and Sweet Potato Super Salad
Serves: 4
Cooking time: 30 minutes
1 large sweet potato
1 tsp olive oil
Salt and chili flakes, to taste
3 tbsp pumpkin seeds
A big bunch of kale (7 oz)
2 tsp olive oil
The juice of ½ orange
16 oz canned black beans (rinse under cold water)
1 red onion
Seeds of ½ pomegranate
1 medium apple
Instructions:
Preheat the oven to 420 F. At the same time, peel and cut the sweet potato to about 1x1 inch cubes.
Season the sweet potato with 1 tsp olive oil, salt and chili flakes (I like adding quite a lot of chili, but follow your own taste buds).
Bake in the oven for 15 minutes. About 3 minutes before it is done, add the pumpkin seeds.
Take the roasted sweet potato out of the oven and let cool.
Remove the stronger stems from the kale and chop or tear the leaves to bite-sized pieces. Mix them with olive oil, salt, and orange juice – feel free to use your hands and really massage the marinade in the leaves – it helps them to soften a bit.
Slice the onion and apple as thin as possible, and take the seeds out of the pomegranate.
Mix everything and enjoy your healthy meal.
By Kadri Raig
Kadri is a food blogger and yoga teacher from Estonia. She loves healthy food and cooking and for her, these two are often the same thing. Cooking meals from scratch, you know exactly what goes in it and even without holding back with sugar or fat we end up using a lot less compared to ready-made frozen stuff from the supermarket.
She does love to spend time in the kitchen, but most of her recipes are simple and don’t take more than 20 minutes of active cooking time. She thinks that everybody can find time to cook healthy food at home, it is just a question of planning. "I work in an office full time, teach yoga 7-8 hours a week and write a blog. So if I manage to cook most of my meals, then so do you!" Connect with Kadri and enjoy many more of her delicious healthy recipes on her website here: http://www.kahvliga.ee/.
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