Cookbook Entry #1: Lemon Garlic Kale Salad

Ingredients: 

1. Bag of chopped kale 

2. 1.5 cups of parmesan 

3. 2 cups of sliced almonds 

4. Dressing

   1. ⅔ cup of olive oil 

   2. 4 cloves of garlic, diced

   3. ⅓ cup of lemon juice 

   4. Kosher salt 

Mom wrote a cookbook about 25 years ago, a feat I always took for granted until I recently saw it lying on the counter of her cousin’s house in New Jersey. I had always known that Mom wrote a cookbook, but I had never really known. 

As a kid, it didn’t seem strange to me that Mom would write a cookbook and print it out for family and friends. To me, it was similar to how my parents both share the same birthday - February 11. Don’t all parents have that in common? 

Skimming through the cookbook at the age of 30 was a treat. I was too young to realize this as a kid, but Mom’s cookbook wasn’t about food. 

Sure, for each recipe, there would be a few sentences on how to cook the dish, but the large majority of her cookbook was about the circumstances surrounding the recipe - her first time trying the dish, who she got the recipe from, and her fondest memories of that person. 

There’s this one recipe in her cookbook titled, “Cheese Quesadilla” which has a whopping two ingredients: flour tortillas and mozzarella cheese. In the recipe, Mom writes about how this was the go-to meal for her and her Ninang Lulu back when they were living together if they were hungry late at night with only an empty refrigerator for company. Mom loved Ninang Lulu like a second mother, so she had to find some way to sneak her into the cookbook.

My first cookbook entry isn’t as simple as a cheese quesadilla, but it’s simple enough - I only have a few pointers. For one, you should toast the almonds on a pan so you can add a crunch to the salad. And as for the garlic, the recipe says 4 cloves, but there’s no such thing as too much garlic. 

If you have a salad spinner, use it to wash your kale - bonus points if you remove the stems. Once you’ve done all the prep, you can mix everything in a bowl and salt to taste. You shouldn’t need too much salt though given all the parmesan.

There isn’t too much of a story behind this salad. It was the product of the pandemic, back when we were trying several recipes a week just to keep busy. As you might imagine, the salad represents so much of my old life - living in San Francisco during the pandemic, shopping at the Safeway across the street from my apartment, hosting dinner parties for friends. 

I’m at the point with this salad where it’s become something like an old friend - it’s reliable, comforting, and always there if I need it. In a way, the salad’s become more to me than just the sum of its ingredients, just like a lot of the entries in Mom’s cookbook.

I met someone late last year who talked about food in this way. She talked about a trip to Burma that she went on with friends - her first time to the country where her mom was from - and how they had arrived in Burma practically starving since their budget airlines didn’t offer any sort of snacks. 

In her mind, the trip would be a chance to try truly authentic Burmese food, not the kind her mom cobbled together from ingredients bought from Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. Although she had never tried Burmese food from anywhere else, she suspected her mom may have toned down the funkier flavors of the cuisine for her American father. 

After checking into their hostel in Burma, she and her friends rushed across the street into a small cafeteria-style restaurant packed with locals who were eating while hunched over small plastic tables. It was the kind of restaurant Bourdain would have raved about.

The line moved quickly and soon enough, they were devouring heaping portions of samosas, egg noodles, and tea leaf salad. Her friends swore it was the best meal they’ve ever had in their lives.

But to her, the meal was just fine. She realized then that her mom made those exact same dishes, but better.