Butternut Squash and Kale Salad
As the number of attendees of each Meatwave has been remaining steadily north of 30, I've been having to adapt to the challenge of feeding that many folks within an hour or two. A major way I've been doing this is finding dishes that can be prepared completely in advance that I feel confident will still be great even if they're not fresh off the grill. I have a similar challenge at Thanksgiving with my family, and I've come to rely on this delicious kale and butternut squash salad recipe by J Kenji Lopez-Alt which can be prepared mostly in the days ahead of the big meal, and then merely assembled at the last minute. At a cookout last fall, I decided to do a variation of that salad that I really love and came out with this grilled butternut squash and kale salad with crispy chickpeas and feta.
That inspirational salad uses seasoned pecans to delivered a required crunch, and I was actually making a batch of seasoned pecans for the cookout already to top sweet potato bites. So my first inclination was to just double up those for two different dishes, but that felt like the salad was going to be a little too much of a copy-cat and I changed course by making crispy chickpeas instead. These were just as easy as making the nuts, but required a little more baking time in the oven to effectively dry out before they got a simple seasoning of brown sugar and cayenne.
Next I made the dressing that leaned into mustard by doubling up with both smooth and whole grain Dijon for a good bite that was mellowed out by honey. A splash of Sherry vinegar provided some extra tang while the require oil, salt, and pepper did their things to make the dressing whole.
"Grilled kale" may be a bit of a head scratcher at first, but despite not seeming well fit for the grill, I've found kale actually grills quite well. The biggest challenge is not having it all fall between the grates, which I battle in two ways. The first is starting with whole kale since I can remove the leaves from the stems in large pieces that are less likely slip through the grates. The only downside to this is buying whole does require washing and drying the leaves, which is an extra step over pre-washed, pre-chopped kale in a bag.
Similarly, I choose to prepare the butternut squash from scratch so I could cut pieces large enough to avoid them slipping through the grill grates. For the squash, I first peeled it and then halved it lengthwise. After scooping out the seeds, I cut slices that were half an inch thick, which may sound a little large, but the squash shrinks a lot during cooking and I also cut them up a bit more after grilling too.
The second way I make sure the kale stays put on the grill is putting it all on in one large mass. When I do this, I have very few pieces fall through the grates and it's also easy to take tongs and keep flipping the the pile of kale so it cooks evenly. I grilled the kale over direct, high heat until it wilted and began to char and crisp in spots. With a blazing hot fire, this only took a few minutes for me, but could be a tad longer depending the heat being outputted by your grill.
Once the kale was done, I transferred it to a large bowl and placed the squash slices, which I had oiled and seasoned, on the grill over indirect heat and covered. I let the squash roast until the slices were softened throughout. A couple times during the 20 or so minutes this took, I checked on the squash and moved and flipped them as needed for even cooking. By the time they were done, most of the squash had good browning, at least around the edges, but slices that were looking a little pale I moved over direct heat to get extra color on them. Once all the squash was done, I sliced the large pieces into smaller chunks and added them to the bowl with the kale.
I then dressed the kale and squash, covered the bowl, and place it in the fridge and was done with prep for this day. Then next day, I removed the kale and squash the from the fridge a couple hours before showtime to take the chill off a bit, and then right before my guests arrived, I mixed in the crispy chickpeas and some feta to finalize assembly.
I tend to make a double recipe of Kenji's salad to serve 8-10 folks on Thanksgiving, so I made triple here to serve 30 people, but I overdid it a bit because this was an insane amount of salad, especially for one with such a deep flavor and heft. While Kenji's version does feel a bit more seasonally appropriate with dried cranberries and pecans, I liked this change of pace from a flavor that has become very familiar to me. The mustard definitely did a lot of the seasoning work, making sure each bite had a strong tang and sharpness that was lessened not only by honey, but the natural sweetness of the butternut squash. The chickpeas had a nice crunch when first served, but this salad sat out for hours, and by the end of the day they lost their shattering crispness, so it's definitely best to add them only at serving time. I felt a bit conflicted about the feta, whose saltiness I appreciated in the overall salad, but it pushed the salad further out of a fall feeling and into its own realm, which definitely could have been a plus if I hadn't been focusing on a very specific flavor palette for this particular menu. All-in-all though, this was a solid salad and delivered on a primary goal of being able to do a lot of work ahead of time, while also standing it's own ground in a menu filled with big offerings like smoked turkey white chili, marinated portobellos, and pork belly burnt ends.
