Hi Friends,
Let’s face it: salad is not a traditional genre of kids’ food. Yes, they’re vegetable-y and often hard to chew, but they can ALSO be crunchy, colorful, sweet-n-sour, and extremely fun to eat. With that in mind, we’re here to propose something radical: *maybe* salad should be a traditional genre of kids food? Since Fanny is in the middle of writing a second cookbook devoted entirely to salad, we thought we’d take this opportunity to test drive three recipes with three extremely scientific hypotheses:
A crunchy wedge salad with ranch-y dressing (hypothesis: kids will eat anything that’s crunchy and covered in ranch dressing)
A Niçoise-ish salad in lettuce cups (hypothesis: a ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ meal that’s eaten with your hands is an irresistible proposition)
A kale salad with avocado and an insanely delicious honey-miso dressing (hypothesis: a sublime, sweet-savory dressing will make kale lovers out of kale enemies)
So, before you dismiss this suggestion as lunacy, try out these three recipes and see how they go down. Just because we can’t imagine our kids will love something, doesn’t mean they won’t—remember Hannah Goldfield’s fennel revelation? Plus, the bonus of making salad for your kids every once in a while is that you, too, will have the opportunity to eat a delicious salad!
Fanny + Greta
You know the one, the steak house special: a big hunk of iceberg lettuce covered in a creamy dressing, crumbled blue cheese and tons of crispy bacon bits. Who doesn’t love that salad? No one. Below, our version of that classic. Optimizing for pick-up-ability and nutritional value, we used little gem lettuce (romaine is great, too) but lord knows you can sub in iceberg with great success. Instead of bacon, we tossed chickpeas in some smoky pimentón, and instead of the notoriously divisive blue cheese, used a mild feta.
The Stats
10 minutes active
30-40 minutes total
Serves 3-4
Ingredients
4-6 heads of little gem lettuce (or 3 heads of romaine), with the root end left on and cut in half lengthwise (be sure to remove any gross outer leaves)
1 can of chickpeas, drained, rinsed and dried very well
1 teaspoon Pimentón (smoked paprika)
½ teaspoon sea salt (plus more to taste)
1 cup greek yogurt
The juice and zest from ½ organic lemon
2 teaspoons of garlic powder
2 teaspoons of onion powder
1 tablespoon fresh parsley, chopped
1 tablespoon fresh dill, chopped
1 tablespoon fresh chives, chopped
Olive oil
Freshly ground black pepper
½ cup crumbled feta cheese
Method
Preheat your oven to 475F (a toaster oven is great for this, if you have one). Toss the chickpeas with a glug of olive olive, pimentón and salt and spread in a single layer on a baking sheet. Roast for about 30 minutes, stirring once or twice to prevent burning.
Next, make your dressing. Combine yogurt, zest, lemon juice, onion powder, garlic powder, herbs, 4 tablespoons of olive oil and 2 tablespoons of water in a food processor or blender and blitz to combine. (You can also do this by hand.) Add salt to taste and a few splashes of water if necessary—you want the dressing to be thick and creamy but you still have to be able to drizzle it.
When the chickpeas have achieved a perfect level of crispiness, take them out of the oven and let them cool.
While the chickpeas cool, assemble your salad. Spread a little pool of dressing on the plate first, then stack your lettuce Lincoln-logs style, before drizzling with the dressing and topping with the crumbled feta and chickpeas. Bonus points for garnishing with more chopped herbs.
Behold: a “choose your own adventure” version of a classic French Niçoise salad. This recipe takes inspiration from the “Deconstructed Salade Niçoise” from Fanny’s book, Always Home, but goes a step further by suggesting you serve all the ingredients separately on a platter, thereby allowing each diner to fill their lettuce cups exactly as they please. In other words, this is the rare activity that doubles as dinner and an opportunity for your kids to exercise their formidable will power.
The Stats
25 mins active, 40 mins total
Feeds ~4 (double the recipe if this will be the main course)
Ingredients
1-2 Persian cucumbers, washed and chopped in chunky pieces with diagonal cuts
1-2 ~3oz jars or tins of good quality tuna or salmon, packed in olive oil (or ~8oz fresh fish, pan-seared or baked)
2-3 medium-sized potatoes
4-8 small red cherry or vine tomatoes, cut in half or quarters, depending on size
¼ pitted olives (Whatever variety you and/or your kid like. We love Niçoise and Castelvetrano best.)
2 soft hard-boiled eggs, peeled and cut into quarters lengthwise
Three slices of sourdough bread, torn into smallish crouton-sized pieces
About 16 large little gem or butter lettuce leaves (~2-3 heads of lettuce), washed and dried
3 tablespoons of diced shallot (about 1 medium shallot)
2 tablespoons wine vinegar ( Banyuls wine vinegar is SO GOOD and lightly sweet-tasting, but white or red wine or champagne vinegar will work, too)
1 tablespoon dijon mustard (our favorite is Amora)
5 tablespoons of olive oil
1 small bunch of basil, chopped (2-3 tablespoons total)
1 lemon
Sea salt
Black pepper
Notes: The amounts listed here are very flexible: if your family loves potatoes, make more of those. If your family is crazy for cucumbers, scale up there. Hate eggs? Skip ‘em. Foes of fish? Use grilled or baked chicken breasts cut into cubes. Why not? It’d be delicious. You know the drill. The dressing can easily be increased in volume by adding more olive oil and vinegar, proportionally.
Method
Preheat the oven to 350F.
Put a medium pot of water on to boil. You’ll use this for your eggs and potatoes.
Next, make your croutons. Toss bread in olive oil and a pinch of salt and lay in a single layer on a sheet pan. Bake for ten minutes, remove and grate a clove of garlic overtop with a Microplane grater and toss well. Return to the oven and bake until fragrant and golden-brown, about another 5 minutes. (The garlic step is optional, obviously, but super delicious!)
When the water is boiling, carefully add your eggs and boil for 8 minutes exactly. (We submerge ours in a metal strainer so there’s less risk of breaking.) As soon as you hit 8 minutes, remove the eggs with the strainer or slotted spoon and plunge them into an ice bath. We know this steps sounds fussy and annoying but it’s essential if you want to avoid chalky, grey yolks.
When the eggs are done, salt the boiling water and add your potatoes. Cook until a knife pierces through them easily (the time it takes will vary depending on the size and variety of the potatoes). Cut into bite-sized chunks but don’t remove the skin.
While the potatoes cook, prep your vinaigrette. Combine the diced shallot in a small bowl with the wine vinegar, a pinch of salt, the mustard and the basil. Let sit to macerate for 10 minutes. Whisk in the olive oil, taste, adjust seasoning if necessary.
Arrange all the ingredients in nice piles on a large platter with the lettuce leaves in a stack at one end. Drizzle the fish with lemon juice.
Spoon the dressing liberally over all the ingredients—except the lettuce and olives.
To serve, assemble a little of each ingredient in a lettuce leaf. Eat as you would a taco!
If you’re thinking “There’s no way my kid will eat a kale salad,” let us implore you to try this dressing, one of Fanny’s most prized concoctions. It’s so tasty that the effect is more “delicious dressing that happens to involve kale” than “health store salad.” If you can, look for curly kale that has a softer, more velvety feel than the frost-bitten stuff that barely survived winter—it’ll need less massaging and will taste less kale-y.
The Stats
15 mins total
Ingredients
~1.5-2 bunches of curly kale (about 8 cups loosely-packed washed, de-stemmed, and torn)
½ cup salted roasted macadamia nuts, roughly chopped
1 ripe avocado, cut into chunks
2 tablespoons chopped Italian parsley
2 tablespoons white sesame seeds
1 large clove of garlic grated on a Microplane grater
2 tablespoons of rice vinegar
2 tablespoons of mellow white miso (we like this one)
1 tablespoon of mild, neutral honey
1 tablespoon lemon juice
4 tablespoons olive oil
Method
Strip the kale leaves from the stems and tear them into smaller pieces.
Submerge the torn kale in a salad spinner filled with cold water. Wash and massage the leaves in their bath and then let them sit in the water while you make your dressing.
In a jar, combine the grated garlic, rice vinegar, miso, honey, lemon juice, and olive oil. Shake vigorously until creamy and homogenous. Taste and adjust the acid and/or oil levels, if needed.
Drain and dry the kale.
Place kale, avocado chunks, chopped parsley, chopped macadamia nuts and sesame seeds in a medium-large bowl. Add dressing and mix well until everything is totally coated. It should look and feel very “dressed.”
Notes: this salad will look like it’s dying once it’s been sitting for a while because of the nature of the heavier dressing, but it actually keeps quite well in the refrigerator for a day—it just feels and tastes more cooked than raw but it’s still tasty.
The Kale salad is super good! The child only ate the avocado and the nuts but the two grownups devoured it all. No leftovers.