From bag to table, healthy salads have never been easier. You've always known that eating green could be healthy, and now it's easier than ever. With the abundance of supermarket selections of prepackaged greens, you can create a restaurant-style salad?along with a fabulous dressing?in your own kitchen. Before bagged blends, a salad with four different types of lettuces was unheard of. Now there are more than fifty different combinations of lettuces, packaged in just the right size, from which to choose. Think beyond iceberg and romaine. The more than one hundred salads and dressings in Simply Salads are colorful, gourmet, and surprisingly simple to prepare. Whether you're looking for the perfect complement to a main dish or you want a salad that can stand as an entrée, you'll find the perfect salad, including such winners
This book has an interesting premise. The author, Jennifer Chandler, begins by saying (Page vii): "Packaged salad blends have changed the way I enjoy salads. With all the varieties of greens now available at the grocery store, it has never been easier to make a great and tasty salad." Some of the blends you can get in a store? Here are ones that I routinely purchase: hearts of romaine, baby spinach, spring mix, European, sweet baby greens, field greens, broccoli slaw, etc.
But it is the recipes that are the heart of this book--over 100 of them. Here are some recipes that I look forward to making. Wilted spinach salad: a bag of baby spinach salad (very nice!), button mushrooms, and the dressing--olive oil, red vinegar, garlic, tarragon, salt, pepper, sugar, and an egg. Sounds yummy to me! I like goat cheese (go ahead, label me a wimp!). Warm Goat Cheese Salad sounds interesting to me (I use goat cheese in salads that I make for myself--my family is resistant, so it's only when I'm fixing for myself that I use this). The salad itself includes European blend, goat cheese, egg, olive oil, bread crumbs, salt and pepper--with a vinaigrette dressing.
For a full meal? Sounds like Chicken Florentine Salad might do the trick. The salad includes pine nuts, olives, capers (yum!), baby spinach, boneless chicken breasts, orzo--and a lemon-parmesan vinaigrette.
And so on. Anyhow, I'm looking forward to playing with some of these recipes. This sure looks like a good addition to my kitchen library.
I’ve never been a big salad eater but, in the rare instance I’ve had a salad that had a perfect balance of dressing, greens and ingredients, I am capable of loving salad. As a single woman with non-salad eating children, I like that the recipes here aren’t huge and usually serve four (smallish) dinner salads. I can make the dressing and prep the ingredients on the weekend and then eat the salad throughout the week, adding fish, chicken or anything else I’m in the mood for. Jennifer Chandler is a perfectionist and you can tell by how well edited and balanced these recipes are. There are no super obscure ingredients, nothing trendy, no “superfood” salads that look great but taste awful. I was so impressed that I got her Simply Suppers book and it is just as fabulous.
This book is pretty interesting. I like how Jennifer Chandler makes making a salad and its dressing so easy and pretty that you want to make it,too. Her tips for buying fresh salad bags are great and has helped me learn to check the salad dates on the bag. Before I read this book, I didn't pay any attention to the fresh dates on the salad bags. Now I check first and make sure that it is at least a week or more fresh before it expires. I'm actually reading it a second time now. I read this last year from the library. It's a book that I think I want to buy one day so I can look up the dressing recipes. The only thing I wish Jennifer included is the calorie, fat, and nutrional facts. Right now I have to manually figure it out by hand. Other than that, this is a great salad book that others would enjoy especially if you're like me and get sick of making and eating the same old salad.
This book has revolutionized the way we do salad at our house. The ingredients are generally easy to find (with a few exceptions--it took me a long time to find sherry vinegar, for example), and I love that she uses packaged salad blends instead of making you shop around for obscure greens in quantities that are really difficult to use up.
Most importantly, these salads explode with flavor. The dressings are fantastic. We'll never go back to bottled dressing!
A wonderful cookbook filled with yummy salads, including some twists on old favorites and an abundance if new salads to try. Haven't been this excited for a cookbook in a ling time.
A great book for people who already like salad, but maybe not for beginners or those looking for salad basics. I do like that this cookbook has a picture of every salad and compiles all the dressings in the back for quick reference.