Mozzarella & Harissa Lamb Bake with a Winter Salad of Kale, Maple Roast Potatoes, Pecans & Tahini Dressing

Phew... very long headline there but there's too much good stuff in this recipe to leave out anything ;)

Kale has long been tarred with the Wellness brush and I, for one, resent this and I’ll tell you why: you CANNOT mention kale in passing without someone saying some variation of ‘oh, you’re trying to be good’.

No, Sharon*… I’m not ‘trying to be good’ I’m trying to enjoy a vegetable. And I am also trying to unlearn diet culture bullshit and, frankly, you’re wrecking that buzz by assigning some bizarre moral value to a leafy green that might even be evil for all you know.

(*Why ‘Sharon’ you ask?! I dunno except once my friend and I saw a man with a foot-wide tramp stamp tattoo of SHARON written in a gothic font across his lower back and ever since then ‘Sharon’ is a name that’s never far from my mind).

Anyway, I happen to love kale, especially in a salad. If you’ve never had it uncooked before then you may not know about one of kale’s cutest little quirks: raw kale likes to be massaged before it is eaten. For some reason, I find this absolutely adorable.

For the vegetarians out there, I have previously used grated cauliflower in place of the lamb in this bake and it works really well. A whole small head grated will serve four (you can also blitz it in a food processor). You can pretty much do the exact same as in the recipe below, the only slight difference is in the frying step: when adding the water just add a little at a time because you don’t want the cauliflower to absorb too much of the water and become soggy.

The other important thing to note about this recipe is that the tahini dressing is one of the greatest dressings of all fucking time. That is all.