This Simple Kale Salad Will Actually Fill You up—and Takes Just 20 Minutes to Make

Tossing a bag of greens in your cart is an automatic part of your weekly grocery shop. Another mainstay of your meal-prep routine? Throwing away that same bag of greens after letting it sit untouched in the bottom of your fridge all week.

In the spirit of Kroger's Zero Hunger Zero Waste initiative (and to help you clean out your refrigerator before letting your produce go to waste), senior food and health editor Jessie Van Amburg teamed up with cookbook author and recipe developer Rachel Mansfield on the latest episode of Cook with Us to show you how to turn your neglected greens into a filling, nutritious, and delicious meal.

Van Amburg challenges Mansfield to make a healthy, vegetarian dinner in 30 minutes or less using three ingredients you've likely had left over before: sprouted grain bread, kale, and tahini.

This salad proves that you can still make a healthy dinner even when your fridge is nearly bare.

Proving that you can still make a healthy dinner even when your fridge is nearly bare (sorry, takeout), Mansfield pulls together a recipe from her cookbook Just the Good Stuff using the challenge ingredients, all of which you can get from Kroger.

"I love when a store is stocked up with all of the goods I need to fuel my family and myself," Mansfield says. "Kroger has so many healthy and organic options to keep on hand at such affordable prices."

And with the OptUp app—a nutrition-scoring app that ranks food from one to 100—it's even easier to find those healthy options. You just search the food or scan the product’s barcode in any store, and the app will show the nutrition score of the product, plus any foods that score higher.

Mansfield's vegan garlicky kale caesar salad features a tahini dressing and homemade croutons using Kroger Simple Truth Organic Sprouted Seeded Thin Sliced Bread (95 OptUP), and she tops the whole thing with Simple Truth Organic Brown Rice & Quinoa (82 OptUP) which she preps in the microwave and then sautés to make it extra crispy.

"I love adding quinoa and brown rice to things, especially salads, because if you want a plant-based or vegetarian option, it adds a little extra substance [...] and really rounds out the meal," Mansfield says.

Van Amburg judges Mansfield's culinary creation on four criteria (ease, flavor, nutrition, and creativity), but to find out how she scored, you'll have to watch the video.

Watch the video above to see whether Mansfield passed the cooking challenge, and to learn how to make her kale salad yourself.

Sponsored by Kroger Health