Salad as a Meal: Healthy Main-Dish Salads for Every Season [Hardcover]

"I could live on raw fish." If you agree with this statement, then you might really like this cook book by renowned foodie, cooking instructor and gardening enthusiast Patricia Wells. Unfortunately, I'm not a fan of raw scallops and the like. I picked this book based purely on the title; Salad as a Meal. I love salads and I love making them the main dish of a meal, sounds like perfection, right?

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.

As many reviewers have already noted, Patricia Wells has a very broad definition of the word salad. This includes cold meat dishes, chicken and soba noodles with a ginger peanut sauce, and hummus (just to list a few examples). I tried two of the salads, the cobb salad and the grilled sausage salad with quick apple compote and watercress. The cobb salad was excellent and had a nice lemon yogurt dressing. The grilled sausage salad also hung together nicely. Both recipes I tried were well written and came together very quickly. The layout of the recipes is done well and she includes a wine suggestion list. In the back of the book, there are resources for finding ingredients, a list of essential kitchen equipment, and a list of the items she considers essential for her pantry.

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.

I like the idea of having salad as a main dish and this cookbook boasts more than 150 recipes for light and healthy meals. With a focus on fresh ingredients and French cuisine, along with beautiful color photographs (although many are not of the recipes themselves), one can't help but be inspired. The section on salad dressings offers good recipes to make salads taste even fresher. There is also a section of breads and soups which always go well with salad.

The challenge with this cookbook is that while the concept of salad is simple, some of the recipes aren't. Some call for specialty ingredients that are not easily found in a local grocery store, and can be expensive. However, cooks with average cooking experience like me or who don't live in an area with year-round farmer's markets offering fresh produce can probably improvise. It is also assumed that the reader knows what certain cooking and French terms mean. At times I got the feeling that I would do fine with this cookbook if I lived in France, had access to a farm for my own fresh produce, meat, and eggs; lived close to the sea where I could buy the catch of the day, and if I attended culinary school. Even though we're just talking salads here, I felt at times that the author was writing with her own culinary peers in mind, not the average cook or someone like me from the midwest with limited access to the kinds of foods she suggests.

The author seems to love raw fish, something I avoid completely, so that eliminated several recipes for me unless I decide to try them with cooked fish. I don't have access to fresh fish markets even if I did eat raw seafood. I found a few recipes to try such as the Greek Salad (p. 79) but I don't have access to heirloom tomatoes or uncured black olives that I need to brine myself so I substituted grocery store tomatoes and canned olives. Other recipes call for things such as zucchini blossoms and fresh capers that you cure yourself which are great if you happen to be growing your own zucchini and can pluck the blossoms, or have a caper bush in your backyard.

This book is gourmet in its approach and many recipes aren't necessarily budget-friendly, aren't necessarily simple, and finding some ingredients may be a challenge. The color photos are gorgeous although many of them aren't of the recipes themselves.

I really wanted to love this book because I do like the concept of healthy salads as a main meal. It just wasn't as practical as I hoped but to its credit, there are some recipes the average cook can enjoy and the beauty of the book does inspire. For that reason I gave it a hesitant four stars instead of three.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review but the opinion of it is my own and was not solicited nor was a positive review required.