Kale salad with apples and toasted almonds

I love greens. Turnip greens, mustard greens, collard greens, kale, arugula/rocket, you name it. I will eat sauteed greens until the cows come home and wonder where all their greens went. The only problem I have with leafy vegetables is that you can come home with two big, beautiful bunches thinking you'll feast for days on it. The sad reality is that your lovely, seemingly bountiful supply of kale will cook down into a puny, sad-looking lump, making your dinner companions think you want to starve them.

So, check it: you don't have to cook your kale! You can eat it raw, in this really tasty salad and, though chopping it up does decrease its volume, you still look like you have a respectable amount to serve to people without their wondering whether they can have seconds. Yes, Virginia, they sure can have seconds. And they'll want them too. This is the best kale salad I've ever had. No joke. 

Kale jokes are lame anyway.

Tangy slaw (without mayo!)

I've made this recipe many, many times. I've served it with tacos, fajitas, hamburgers, barbecue chicken, and sloppy joes. Tangy and light, it's a perfect summer salad--the kind of thing you can leave out on a picnic table without giving people food poisoning. I mean, don't leave it out all day, but it'll hold up nicely for a couple hours, certainly. It's also a great side dish for vegans or those who hate mayonnaise (I won't shame the mayo-haters on this blog by calling them out by name, but....they know who they are).

Smoky eggplant dip

This is another throwback from college, when all I had access to was my janky old blender and my roommate's George Foreman grill. Alison really loved all things eggplant, brought on by a summer spent in Sicily, eating her weight in pasta alla norma (eggplant and pasta in a marinara sauce). I remember kind of hating this, because I always associated eggplant with a soggy nightmare food. This, I will concede many years later, is probably not a fair assessment. 

Lime in da coconut pie

In undergrad, I would make lemon/lime bars using Keebler Sandies cookies as the crust. I can't remember why I did it in the first place, probably because they were easy and my mom would always pack them in the groceries she sent back to school with me. After college, I stopped making citrus bars and subsequently stopped using shortbread cookies. This short backstory is only relevant because I was sitting in my apartment a while back, trying to think of ways to use up limes and I remembered my college obsession with citrus bars. I had some Nilla wafers on hand and knew I could construct a pretty bangin' lime pie. I call it a pie instead of a bar dessert, because I used a round dish and the lime filling is more custardy and less solid than one might expect of a bar.

Limeade

I like nothing better than sweet and tart things. Citrus of all varieties is one of my favorite ingredients, especially limes and lemons. In the summer, there are two things I love to drink: limeade and my mom's sun tea.

Broccoli salad

The last few weeks have been rough for various reasons, but it has reminded me how excellent my friends and family are. The emptiness of friendship is one complaint I've yet to make. I had so many people help me pack up my stuff, haul boxes to storage and the donation drop-off, and clean up my disaster of an apartment. To them, I say, "Thank you, I love you, I don't know what I would have done without you."

I'd probably have done a lot of crying without you. A lot a lot of crying. Thanks, folks! On to food . . .