Too often, salads are the “sad” meal option: limp lettuce, tasteless dressing, underripe vegetables. And sometimes they’re those giant fast-casual salads, buckets of kale chopped within an inch of its life, topped with a scoop of quinoa, barely more appealing than the former. Jess Damuck, a food stylist and recipe developer, is out to change our perception of salad. Her new cookbook, Salad Freak: Recipes to Feed a Healthy Obsession, is all about, as she writes in the introduction, salad becoming “something of its own art form.” She explains that, in many ways, anything can be a salad. There are recipes to make a salad for any meal of the day, as something to accompany other dishes, or to be the main event—and even some that are sort of secret salads, like Caesar Salad Pizza, Yellow Gazpacho, and Carrot & Saffron Socca. “A salad can be a side dish, but it shouldn’t get stuck being an afterthought,” Damuck writes. “I eat salads first thing in the morning too—whether it’s a big bowl of citrus or thick, juicy slices of tomato—why not?”
Salad Freak is organized by the seasons: As those who’ve eaten chopped tomatoes from a salad bar in December (so, everyone?) will know, produce typically tastes best during the time of year it grows naturally. Sure, winter isn’t necessarily the best time to make a fruit salad with strawberries, just as a roasted kabocha squash salad in mid-June isn’t ideal; but chicories and citrus in January, or fresh peas in peak spring? Yes, please!
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