Lemony Kale, White Bean, & Avocado Detox Salad with Charred Tempeh (2024)

Full dislcosure: we call this the Matt Salad. Or Malad for short. My husband whipped this up for our little team one afternoon while we were working at the Local Milk Studio (a.k.a. my house), and we were like “damn son!” And so we tested it, codified it, stylified it, photofied it, and here it is! It’s a great little detox salad for the new year full of whole, healthy ingredients, and it’s ridiculously quick & easy to make. We’re talking ten minutes flat. Five if you’re a savvy meal planning babe with grains and legumes precooked on the ready.

So let me wax nutritional awesomeness about this salad for a minute:It’s got hellah healthy fats from the avo & flax seed oil in the dressing (though you can use olive oil too…no need to go buy flax seed oil just for this is if isn’t something you’d use on the reg!); loads of protein from tempeh, white beans, and quinoa; and the lovely array of vitamins in minerals in our old friend, kale. Kale might not be sexy, but it sure is ubiquitous & nutritious. So maybe the best part of this salad is that it brings kale’s sexy back.

You could drop the quinoa and white beans to make it keto/paleo/whole 30 friendly if that’s your January jam. It’s vegan, dairy free, and gluten free too. It’s a versatile little salad, so if you don’t have white beans, you could use chickpeas, black beans, or your legume of choice instead. Same goes for the greens? Still not buying the idea that kale could every be sexy? Try collards, chard, or any other leathery green. The greens get a quick massage in the dressing to help break them down and make them tender so they aren’t a rubbery mess. Out of quinoa? Hate quinoa? No problem. Substitute the whole grain of your choice or skip it entirely!

Best part? Make a big ol’ bowl (I usually leave the avo off and add it last minute if I’m doing this) and dish it up for lunch for a few days in different ways

5 Ideas for Repurposing Kale & White Bean Salad:

1. Put it in a wrap with some vegan or non-vegan sour cream or cheese.

2. Sizzle it in a skillet for a few minutes and top with a fried egg for a healthy breakfast hash.

3. Turn it into a soup by simmering it in a veggie broth or even water. Try adding some good canned tomatoes and season with salt, pepper, and lemon to taste. Maybe some chili flakes for good measure!

4. Cook the salad in a skillet and toss with pasta and plenty of lemon.

5. Put it in a frittata!

Also, if you want to make sure you don’t miss any of the recipes we have coming up (a crazy good turmeric coconut cauliflower soup with miso, beauty bliss balls, and more!) make sure to drop your name and email in the box at the end of this post and subscribe. But what a lot of people don’t know that read this blog is I also send out freebies like tutorials & guides as well as a monthly newsletter called The Art of Slow Living all about work, life, and making your dream life a reality. So if you join the community, there’s a lot more in it for you that just blog posts! We’re even thinking about starting a podcast! If that’s something you’d be interested in, let me know what you’d like to hear us talk about in the comments….I’m wracking my brain for ideas! I have SO many! I would love your feedback.

Print Recipe

This recipe serves 4 as a light lunch or 2 really hungry people. You can scale up the recipe as much as you’d like or scale it back to suit your needs. I like to double the recipe so that there are plenty of leftovers to use in other things like soup, wraps, and my favorite thing to do with leftovers is fry them up in a skillet with a little olive oil and top them with a fried egg.