My journey to becoming a salad person continues today with this Apple Cranberry Bacon Kale Salad. It sounds like it will be a hybrid between two salads I’ve blogged before. It has several of the ingredients from the Apple, Bacon & Pecan Salad with Garlic Balsamic Dressing with a dressing that sounds similar to the one on the Easy Kale Salad with Lemon Dressing. I have made both of those salads several times, and they never disappoint. Combining the two is brilliant! Well, it sounds brilliant. Let’s find out if it is.
Crisp apple, dried cranberries, feta cheese, almonds, and kale come together in this fresh Autumn salad. And the best of all? Toss some crispy bacon in and you are set for life!
The Ingredients
This salad is packed with easy to find simple ingredients, including a few superfoods like kale, cranberries, and almonds. All I had to buy a bottle of apple juice, a red delicious apple, and two bunches of lacinato kale to make it. I had the rest on hand either as pantry staples or leftovers.
There were a couple of minor changes, like using leftover sliced almonds instead of buying chopped. I also had some bacon, so I made my own bacon bits. Really, all that amounted to was frying 6 pieces of bacon while I prepared the salad and dressing.
The Process
Talk about easy! Making this salad was just as easy as I imagined. I put the bacon on to fry and did the rest while it cooked. The salad part was a little bit of chopping but mostly throwing things into a big bowl. I mean gently placing ?
Then I measured the salad addressing ingredients into a sealed container and gave it a good shake. The bacon finished around this time, so I gave it a quick chop and tossed it into the bowl with everything else.
Pouring the salad dressing and giving it all a quick toss was the final step. That’s it, my Apple Cranberry Bacon Kale Salad was ready to serve.
I did use an apple corer and slicer, but it’s strictly optional. You can also use pre-made bacon bits to speed things up, but frying the bacon while prepping the rest was almost no work.
