Healthiest Salad Ever

Even though kale salad is all the rage, I'm just not crazy about the texture.  But I have found that if I chop it up like cole slaw, I can handle it just fine.  So I've started experimenting with chopping up all the veggies like that and I've hit on something quite awesome.

Most of it I do from scratch but for this batch, I happened to have a box of broccoli slaw with carrots in it - sort of cut up like match sticks.  The rest I did myself.

So I started with that box of broccoli and carrot slaw and tossed it in the food processor for a few bursts.  Dumped it in the bowl.

Next I chopped up a bunch of green kale leaves followed by red kale leaves.  Into the bowl

A few chunks of purple cabbage and then some green cabbage.  I had some radishes so those went into the food processor to add some "pepper".



This has to be one of the prettiest salads I've ever made!  But I wasn't done yet.

I scooped out a cupful into a bowl and added sunflower seeds, pine nuts and a few dried cherries.  And just a tablespoon of Newman's Poppy Seed Salad Dressing.  Oh my.  Crunchy heaven in a bowl!





Since it's a lot of work to chop all this up I usually make a pretty big batch so I have some to take to work for lunch three or four days (along with a spool of dental floss!!).  Last week I decided to try using my FoodSaver and it worked!  My salad was super fresh even 5 days later!



I do not add the seeds, nuts or cherries until I'm ready to add the dressing and eat it.  This is just the veggies in the FoodSaver pack.  Even though the salad seems pretty dry, it still has enough moisture that the seeds would get soggy and the dried cherries would absorb moisture too.

The nuts and seeds add the most calories to this salad and certainly could be left out. With them it's about 350 calories.  Leave them out and you save about 200 calories - of course, that depends on how many you use in the first place!