Salad as a Meal: Healthy Main-Dish Salads for Every Season
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Not what I’d hoped for,
Sadly, this book is not for me.
Here’s what I liked about it;
1..Excellent and inventive recipe for croutons – one in particular using polenta may actually get me interested in buying polenta to make them
2. Perfectly detailed instructions on how to poach fish. Poached fish, especially salmon is an auto pick for me when I go to nice restaurants. I’ve never tried to make it at home because I thought I’d need one of those specialty fish poacher thingies and frankly I have neither the extra $ or the cabinet space.
3. Lovely and very useful recipes for flavored salts. I don’t know why it’s never occured to me to make some of my own at home (I’m slow, I guess), but I just mixed up a batch of lemon salt per Ms. Wells recipe (it smells divine) and I’m going to try it out on some chicken I’m making for dinner tonight. But I could also see using this on hummus, tabouli, chocolate caramels, bread dip, the applications are flipping endless!
Here are the reasons I do not like this book, they are biggies.
1. There aren’t as many salads in this book as I’d supposed, the book is broken down into chapters, Soups (comprised mostly of cold soups, seven out of the nine are chilled soups and I’ not a fan of cold soups, sorry), Eggs, Fish, Poultry, Meat, Bread and sauces.
2. Over half of the photographs in the book are of her garden. Gorgeous closeups of limes, a bowl of capers, a weathered chair, grapes, anyway, you get where I’m going with this, WHERE’s the FOOD? Well, there are pics of some of the recipes, but some that I’d especially want to see a pic of the finished result (such as the zucchini carpaccio) are not there and others, like a recipe for marinated olives are done in close up. Such a waste of photo space. I’ll admit that I’ve been spoiled by Foodgawker and other cooking websites who always have a tasty finish photo, but it seems strange to me that most of the pictures included in this book have little to do with the recipes. If I wanted a photo album of a home garden in France, well then I’d . . well you know what I’d do.
3. Too many specialty ingredients without a reasonable explanation why they are required. When I make Alton Brown’s soft pretzels I use kosher salt, because I know it is the closest to pretzel salt that I can buy at my Safeway grocery. Why should I buy some of these specialty vinegars and oils and what would work in their place if I couldn’t afford a $30 bottle of vinega? No answers.
4. Raw poultry. Not rare poultry or slightly pink poultry, I mean raw, like you can practically hear the the little cluckers squawking at you for eating them. Yikes.
5. Simple, yes. Bland, yes. I’m talking here about most of the salad dressings. I like a little more zing, some zippiness, more of the punch in your gut than the feather on your foot kind of flavoring and for me a dressing composed of buttermilk, salt and lemon just doesn’t cut it. It’s like salad dressings for people who think ranch dressing is spicy.
Sigh, my search for a book of salads and dressings continues.
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Interesting book for the adventurous cook,
The recipes in this book range from the relatively simple to the very adventurous. For example, there is a recipe for curing beef fillet in salt and sugar (a 3-15 day operation), a recipe for smoking duck or chicken breast, and a recipe for an oxtail salad. Another section is recipes for making your own condiments, from fig chutney to curing your own olives and capers- Fun! If you are up to this challenge, you will delight in this book. Personally, I love trying bizarre and strange new foods so this is a definite selling point. If you like your menus simpler, you may be frustrated by the unusual ingredients and strange recipes.
A minor point is that while the pictures in the book are all very beautiful, they are not always relevant to the recipes. Personally, I like a picture per recipe and I wish this had more pictures. I tend to choose the recipes with a picture and I often never cook those without.
All in all, I enjoyed this cookbook and will probably use it quite a bit. I would recommend this to anyone who likes to experimenting in the kitchen.
This is an update to my initial review as my husband and I have continued to try different salads in this book. This cookbook is really growing on us. Two salads we made were particularly good. We made the dandelion greens salad with bacon-wrapped goat cheese which was a huge hit (I did get a lot of pleasure on chewing on dandelions- a bit of revenge on those yard weeds!) The quinoa salad with spinach, parsley, and spring onions may now be our favorite quinoa dish- my four year old called this a “make again dish”. She has you toast the quinoa before cooking which gave it a nutty flavor that was pretty awesome. But so far, every salad we have made has been quite tasty. This is definitely a nice resource to add to your collection.
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Some great ideas, but not for everyone,
I like several of the recipes, though. The Cobb Salad, though I just serve it tossed, is really nice. There are a bunch of recipes for things like croutons, and instructions on making some of the more involved ingredients that you would normally just buy. I’ve always enjoyed doing little things like that as projects, so I’m really happy with that.
The downsides could really rule this one out for some people, though. Hopefully there will be a “Look Inside” section for this one. When most people see “Salad as a Meal” as a book title, they probably aren’t expecting to need cooking rings to shape salads for presentation, or extremely specific ingredients like some of the ones mentioned in other reviews that they almost certainly won’t have sitting in their cupboards and may not even have easy access to depending on the depth of their grocery store. Back to the section about making ingredients, I’m really looking forward to trying to cure my own olives and make my own cornichon, but I’m weird like that. Also, there are lots of really great pictures, but only about half as many as there are recipes, and only half of those pictures are actually of the finished recipes. I mean, I realize there are tomatoes in lots of salads, but I’d rather see more pictures of those salads than a picture of a bowl full of tomatoes.
Looking back, it looks like I had a lot more negative to say about this book than positive, but that really isn’t the case. I’m glad I have it and will be using it fairly regularly. My partner has been really watching what he eats, and as I said has fallen in love with salads as a way to include more fresh, healthful things into our diets. This book gives me a lot of delicious pieces that I can make myself and have complete confidence in the ingredients we’re eating. That alone is worth having this book.
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