Salad for Dinner: Complete Meals for All Seasons

Description

A celebration of contrasts in color, flavor, and texture-an artfully prepared salad is one of the most appealing dishes to eat, engaging all the senses. It is a basic culinary fact but often overlooked: a salad packs the most flavor because the dressing coats every bite. And with the right combination, a salad can be a full meal in itself. We all know it is healthier to eat more vegetables and whole grains. But how do you do so on a daily basis? This book reframes the question: Why not make greens the foundation of the plate? Smart, imaginative ideas abound: kale with lemon, parmesan, and almonds; Indonesian chicken salad with pineapple slaw; and salmon with quinoa, sorrel, and yogurt. There are super-hearty salads to satisfy even the biggest appetites, such as Korean barbecue beef salad; duck confit with fingerlings and frisee; and buttermilk fried chicken salad. These recipes help us break out of the "meat-and-three" box, leading to a new way of thinking about dinner.

Jeanne Kelley has written for Bon Appetit magazine for twenty years and is a frequent contributor to Cooking Light and Fine Cooking. Her articles have also appeared in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Prevention, and Cooking.com. She is the author of Blue Eggs and Yellow Tomatoes.

"Whether you're making a weeknight dinner for the family or a weekend party for a crowd, this is the book you'll reach for time and again. Salad for Dinner should be subtitled: gorgeous, satisfying, surprising meals you'll want all through the year." --Dorie Greenspan, author of Around My French Table "Jeanne's book is a brilliant new take on salads-smart, thoughtful and full of stunning flavor combinations." -Kim Boyce, author of the James Beard Award-winning Good to the Grain "Jeanne Kelley is not like you and me. Her real genius is in assemblage, the ability to transform a seemingly random plateful of vegetation into a composition perfectly evocative of the season, and the gift of Salad for Dinner is that it lets us do the same." -Jonathan Gold, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for L.A. Weekly "Jeanne Kelley shows you how to make a salad that will rock your dinner table. From growing your own to foraging greens, Kelley expands your salad horizons." -Erik Knutzen, co-author of The Urban Homestead and Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post Consumer World "Since southern California is one of the world's great salad bowls, both in terms of its superb produce and the cross-polinating ethnic variety of its population, you couldn't possibly find a better cook than Los Angeles-based Jeanne Kelley to help you discover its culinary bounty. She's also a serious but very charming writer, and this beautifully produced book should be sold with a spatter-guard, since it's one that will live in the kitchen." -Alexander Lobrano, Saveur writer and author of Hungry for Paris "Jeanne's homage to salads is wonderful. I love the clean, simple sophistication of the cookbook, and the recipes are innovative as well as informative. This book is like a salad 'bible,' and will inspire you to cook, garden, entertain, and appreciate all the joys of living. This is no coffeetable book-it will stay in your kitchen at all times." -Suzanne Tracht, Chef/Owner of Jar, Los Angeles, Top Chef Masters star, and Food and Wine Best New Chef. "The photos are lavish; the recipes are both imaginative and easy to follow." --San Diego Magazine "...this is simply a book you really want to cook from. There is a fantastic glossary of greens that tells you about those market finds and what to do with it, followed by a primer on how to build a great salad." --LA Weekly Blog