Baby Kale Salad with Feta, Pomegranate, and Candied Pumpkin Seeds

I’ve signed up for National Blog Posting Month which means I’m blogging every day of November, 2013.

It’s Day 4 of National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) and I have to say I am LOVING it! NaBloPoMo is really stimulating my creativity…it’s making me think a little outside of the box in terms of my posts. It’s also steering me away from my perfectionistic tendencies, which feels surprisingly nice.

Don’t get me wrong: I am still striving to do high quality work here, of course. But at the same time I am acutely aware of “not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good”. Sometimes good enough really is good enough. (Apply this statement to your writing, recipes, and photography if you are a food blogger, or to your parenting or your diet or something else, and see if it helps to liberate you in some way.)

I bought some baby kale last week and I have been using it a lot. There are no tough stems to deal with and the leaves are very tender. It makes a great addition to soups, and also to salads. I used some in this Baby Kale Salad with Feta, Pomegranate, and Candied Pumpkin Seeds, and it was really delicious.

I am not going to write this out in “official recipe format” because it’s quite time consuming for me to do that (and my goal this month is to write more posts, but spend less time on each one). So…this is how I made this salad: Fill a bowl with a few heaping handfuls of baby kale (or use any other type of baby greens). Add the arils from 1/4-1/2 of a pomegranate. Toss and then add some feta cheese. You don’t want to add too much because then your salad will be overly salty, but you want enough so that you get more than a little feta with each bite. If you don’t want to use feta, try this with crumbled goat cheese. Top with some Candied Pumpkin Seeds, or use candied (or raw) pecans or walnuts (or the seed/nut of your choice). I dressed my salad with a few squeezes of fresh lemon juice and a generous drizzle of olive oil. Freshly ground black pepper and a sprinkling of sumac, if you have it, are nice here, as well.

A bowl of this salad serves at least 2 people. To pack individual servings with some protein, add some cooked chicken or a poached egg or two…YUM!