Hey food truck fans! So a couple weeks ago I was invited over a friend’s house for a dinner party. I was assigned to bring a salad, and after happening upon Mei Mei Street Kitchen’s recipe for their Magical Kale Salad, I decided to give it a go!
Today I’ll be giving a play-by-play of my experiment cooking up Mei Mei’s Magical Kale Salad. You can find the recipe in fabulous haiku form on Mei Mei’s site and try it yourselves!
The Magic Begins: Kale Salad Creation
Here is my kale, all chopped and washed with my fancy new salad spinner. I was making a salad for a (honorary) family of five, so I used two piles of fresh organic kale.
Next I mixed together my lemon juice and extra virgin olive oil. Mei Mei’s says you can use one part rice wine, vinegar, or lemon juice, combined with three parts olive oil. I chose lemon juice because I’m nuts about it. For my quantity of kale, I used 1/4 lemon juice mixed with 3/4 olive oil.
The combination is poured onto the kale, massaging it as you go along, getting it nice and coated. Apparently massaging kale is really the way to go – I hear if you spend a good chunk of time massaging kale, a lot of the bitterness comes out. I forgot this piece of wisdom so I didn’t spend much time relieving the kale’s excruciating back pain, but if you can, massage that kale and let me know if you taste a difference!
As the Mei Mei gang notes, don’t use so much that it pools at the bottom – just enough so that all of the kale is properly coated.
Add kosher salt and mix it all in with your oily hands. Keep going and taste now and then. As Mei Mei’s notes, it’s ready “when it tastes so delicious/ you don’t want to stop.”
The next step is to heat up some canola oil on the stovetop and add a couple chunks of garlic. I grabbed my garlic from my lower cabinet and look what I found! Monster mutant garlic! Gah! It looks like what I’d imagine to be an armadillo or gopher paw with nasty long toe nails. Thankfully I just cut off those bad boys and the garlic was fine….or was it!?
Next is breadcrumbs time! Measure out around a cup of panko (OK, I cheated and used normal breadcrumbs).
Breadcrumbs get all nice and mixed up with the canola oil and garlic in the pan. I accidentally poured waaay too much canola so I had to add more and more breadcrumbs….I wasn’t too beat up about it. I tossed it about until it was nice, brown, and crispy.
Final product time! The breadcrumbs were sprinkled and mixed in with the kale. Then I added a poached egg, feta cheese, and pecorino cheese. Mei Mei’s suggests a wide assortment of toppings: pine nuts, cranberries, bacon, chicken chips, whatevs! “This is your salad now” they say. I think they are putting a little too much faith in me.
The Results
I’m not much of a chef, so I was worried how this would turn out. It was a big hit and got completely devoured. My result definitely wasn’t as good at the original cooked up by the Street Kitchen gang, but still incredibly drool worthy. I made a lot and was hoping I’d have some left over to take home, but NO WAY!
The fact that the folks at Mei Mei are nice enough to share their recipe with the hungry masses is proof of just how superbly awesome they are. Thanks for filling empty, kale-less bellies everywhere.
Will you try your shot at preparing the most magical of salads? If you do, comment and share your results!
Did you like this post? Want to see me attempt to cook up another food truck specialty? Let me know!
