Kale Salad with Avocado Goddess Dressing. For this batch, I used homegrown kale. Yum!

This beautifully colorful recipe is my version of a recipe from the How Not To Die Cookbook – Over 100 Recipes to Prevent and Reverse Disease by Dr Michael Greger. I just recently discovered this cookbook, and I love it! Dr. Greger researched studies that show which foods are most associated with longevity, and the cookbook’s recipes use them often. The book has a list called the “Daily Dozen Foods,” and each recipe in the cookbook tells you which ones it checks off. This recipe, according to the cookbook, checks off: beans, greens, other vegetables, nuts and seeds, and herbs and spices. So it is very healthy!

It also tastes fantastic! I adore the amazingly bright green dressing! It is mostly green from avocado, but it also contains parsley blended in, which makes the creamy avocado color an even brighter shade of green.

Anyway, this recipe is my adapted version of the recipe from the cookbook. I definitely recommend this cookbook — yum!

The dressing makes a great replacement for other sauces — I’ve used it as a topping on veggie patties, and I think you could often replace ketchup or salsa with it. I love how healthy it is: With most salad dressings I feel that I should use only a small amount, because they are not a healthy food, while this dressing is so healthy that it’s okay to pile it on!

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Kale Salad with Avocado Goddess Dressing

I am a bit in love with this amazingly bright green dressing. It is mostly green from avocado, but it also contains parsley blended in, which makes the creamy avocado color an even brighter green. This whole kale and sweet potato salad is delicious!

Prep Time10

Cook Time15

Total Time25

Course: Dinner, lunch or dinner, main dish

Cuisine: American

Keyword: delicious, gluten-free, healthy, vegan

Servings: 4

Ingredients

Dressing

1 ripe avocado
1 scallion - or a handful of garlic chives I find wild garlic chives in my garden
1 clove garlic, or 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon of garlic powder
1/4 cup fresh parsley
1 teaspoon dried tarragon or 1 tablespoon fresh if you have it! - It's also okay to substitute another herb or just leave this out entirely.
fresh juice of 1/2 lemon - about 2 tablespoons include the lemon pulp, if possible (but, of course, not the seeds!)
1/2 teaspoon white miso paste or you can use a pinch of salt (about 1/24 teaspoon) instead - this makes the recipe soy-free
1/8 teaspoon smoked paprika or another blend of herbs or spices

Salad

4-6 cups beets and/or sweet potatoes, rinsed and cut into cubes - skin on is okay
1 bunch kale chopped into bite-sized pieces
1 can beans (15 ounces) - or 1 1/2 cups cooked beans most beans work here - cannellini beans, black beans, kidney beans, etc.
1/4 cup nuts walnuts, pecans, cashews, whatever nuts or seeds you have available

Instructions

Cut the beets and/or sweet potatoes into cubes, one-inch or smaller. You can put them in water and boil for 15 minutes, or steam them, or roast them in a 400 degree oven for 20-30 minutes. Whichever way you cook them, they are done when they are soft enough to be easily pierced with a fork.
Meanwhile, cut the kale into pieces, rinse the beans in a strainer, and add them both to a big serving bowl.
Put all the dressing ingredients into a blender. My main blender jar is too big to blend this well, so I either double the dressing recipe (it gets eaten up quickly!) or I use a smaller 12-ounce "smoothie" jar of the blender to blend it. Blend until smooth, stopping the blender to scrape down the sides as needed. Sometimes I need to add olive oil and/or water to get it to blend smoothly -- sometimes it needs a lot of added liquid to blend. Keep blending and adding liquid until everything is completely smooth and circulates easily in the blender.
When the root veggies are cooked, drain them if you boiled them, and add them to the big bowl. Then gently stir the mixture of beans, kale, and root veggies.
To serve, put the kale-veggie mixture into each person's bowl. Scoop some dressing on top, and add nuts on top. Yum!
If there are leftovers, I recommend storing the nuts, dressing, and salad separately and combining them just before serving. The dressing only lasts a couple of days in the fridge.