
Salad is one of the trickier components of a meal to get right when you’re serving a crowd. Sure, a casserole can be frozen or reheated, but a salad? Ehhhh…. If you’re gonna eat those leftovers, you kinda gotta eat them within a couple days of the original meal.
For Thanksgiving, I usually serve a kale salad (specifically one with cranberries and pecans that’s a riff on a Smitten Kitchen recipe). I go with kale partially because the flavor profile seems to fit so perfectly with Thanksgiving and partially because it’s heartier than lettuce or baby spinach so I better trust it to hold up while it’s resting on our buffet and in the fridge for a couple-days post meal.
But still, while I’ll freeze all the leftover stuffing I need to, I’m not putting my kale salad in the freezer. I mean, maybe if I were super desperate I might saute it for a minute and then freeze it, but, I’d rather not. So, I want to get my volumes as well aligned as possible. This past Thanksgiving I bought two bunches of kale at the farmers market, thinking they looked small and wondered if I should get another one.
Absolutely not! There was zero need to get another one! In fact, here’s what I concluded for our next holiday dinner: One regularly sized bunch of kale is exactly how much we need for a salad serving 8 adults. Now, to be fair, there were a lot of other dishes on the table, so the kale had a lot of competition, but even with fewer other options, I think one bunch would suffice.
Takeaway: For a dinner party for eight adults, at which you’ll be serving a kale salad and other dishes, the leaves from one bunch of kale should be sufficient. (And don’t forget to blanch and then freeze the stems for a future pesto dish. You can also pickle them!)
For more help calibrating the volume of food at your next party, check out the Guest-imator from NRDC as well as other articles in our Parties & Entertaining section.