Food babe's kale salad and avocado toast!

My dad is staying with us for a few weeks this spring since Rich is traveling a lot for work right now.  We absolutely love having him. It makes the work travel so much less excruciating for me, the parent left behind. And regardless of whether Rich is gone or home it's awesome to have the extra help. Every time he comes to stay I feel beyond spoiled.

It's also nice to have someone to eat dinner with besides my toddler (and it's not like I eat with her anyway. I need both hands free to corral that situation). It means I may actually on occasion have a real dinner as opposed to crackers and hummus or whatever Valerie didn't finish off her tray.

Tonight was an especially good one.  I have to credit one of my favorite bloggers/facebook pages, Food babe, for inspiring this dinner.  This morning she shared on facebook her breakfast of avocado, dijon mustard and black pepper on toast. I already knew I LOVE avocado on toast, and I love avocado with dijon mustard, but this exact combination I had not yet tried. I sometimes have a grilled avocado and cheese sandwich with butter, but after trying avocado on toast with just mustard and pepper, WOW, no butter needed. My toast was rye toast. And just wow, the combination of the creamy avocado, the rye toast crunch, the zesty mustard and the spice of the pepper... here is how you know it's GOOD: my dad claims to hate avocado, but he took a bite, and was converted.

"Wow... that avocado is really good with the dijon mustard..." "this is pretty tasty!"  He ate the whole slice. I was amazed. This is a man who claims guacamole is nauseating.

There are a lot of foods my dad and I can't agree on. Meat - he loves. Cooked vegetables - he hates. Tofu - out of the question. But one thing we can agree on is kale. And last week I saw Food Babe had a recipe for melt-in-your-mouth kale salad. It looked pretty simple and I knew we had to try it. The key is using a food processor to chop the kale into tiny pieces.  If you've ever eaten a non-finely-chopped kale salad, you know why. That stuff takes some serious chewing. The food processor takes the work out and helps make even more of the amazing nutrients in kale available for digestion. Win-win!

The dressing is so simple - olive oil, lemon juice and honey.  I never think to put honey in my salad dressing but I am going to so much more from now on. You would not believe how sweet and delicious it is. I don't really love the flavor of honey by itself, but in dressing... YES.

Food babe calls for currants but I chopped up some dried cranberries instead since I had some handy.

The salad was pretty quick and easy to throw together. I already had some leftover grated parmigiano and toasted pine nuts since I made pesto the other day so it worked out perfectly. And it looks so pretty and vibrant green when you toss it all together! I can't wait to make this salad for guests the next time we have some. It is going in the staple file. We just about licked the bowl clean!