Roasted Kalettes Salad with Warm Bacon Dressing + Website Changes

I have no idea where January is going, but it is for sure going fast. I don’t make new year resolutions. Instead, I set up goals for what I want to accomplish every year. I do few checkups through the year and a final one in December. That helps me determine what I have achieved, what I need more time to complete and want to move up to next year’s goals. Finally, I cross out the goals that I didn’t accomplish and won’t make a difference in my life at the moment. Therefore they should be gone.

One of my goals for 2018 is to work on the website and focus on my personal chef business. I started by changing the look of the site. There will be more changes coming, but I am working one step at a time. I also finally have a logo (yeah!). It is a work in progress so stay tuned. Thank you for following along on this journey with me!

On my long pile of recipes to share I had this beautiful salad. Have you ever heard of Kalettes? I heard about it last fall from Vitruvian Farms. They are a hybrid vegetable, a cross between kale and Brussel sprouts. They are super pretty and have both leafy and crunchy texture from the brassica combination. I asked Tommy Stauffer, one of the founders of Vitruvian Farms to explain how kalettes come to be, and here is what he had to say:

“They are not genetically modified but crossbred through non-GMO methods.  This is normally done through cross-pollination.  They selectively use plants that contain the attributes they want and cross-pollinate over many growing cycles.  This is what happens in nature, they just select the plants they want to cross-pollinate versus nature over-time making new plants through the same process” – Tommy Stauffer, Vitruvian Farms

For this salad, I roasted the kalettes, combined them with a bunch of different radishes I had, and made a sweet dressing to cut through the bitterness. Bacon flavor is all over the salad as I used the fat rendered from the bacon to create the dressing and use the crunchy bacon to top it all. I hope you are able to find this hybrid brassica in your local market, when you do, come back here for the recipe!  

Ingredients: 

1/2 lb. Kalettes

1 tablespoon olive oil

1/4 teaspoon salt 

4 bacon strips, cut into small pieces

3 radishes, thinly sliced

1 red sweet pepper, thinly sliced

1 unpeeled red delicious apple, thinly sliced 

Dressing:

1/4 cup bacon fat

1 Tablespoon brown sugar

1 Tablespoon whole grain mustard

1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar

Salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 400° F

In a baking sheet, spread kalettes in a single layer, season with salt, drizzle with olive oil and bake for 8 minutes or until the outer leaves start to get brown and crunchy.

Meanwhile, add the bacon to a sauté pan over medium heat. Cook, occasionally stirring until crispy, about 10 minutes.

Remove from the pan and drain over paper towels.

Add 1/4 cup of the bacon fat in a bowl, add the sugar and whisk quickly to dissolve the sugar while still hot. Whisk in mustard, apple cider, and season with salt and pepper.

In a large bowl, combine roasted kalettes, radishes, sweet pepper, and apple slices. Drizzle with the dressing and toss gently. Top with the bacon bits. Enjoy!