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Monday, March 18, 2024
March 18, 2024

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Check it out: Salad book gets blessings for gift of delicious greens

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Perhaps it seems like the wrong time of year to be writing about salads. Well, if soup is more your thing right now, Brother Victor-Antoine d’Avila-Latourrette (such a melodious-sounding name, oui?) stirs up soup recipes, too; and that book, “Twelve Months of Monastery Soups” is also available at the library. But today I’m all about salad because, as my husband likes to say, I must be part rabbit. Cat lady? Yes. Rabbit gal? Maybe.

There are two very good reasons for my salad obsession: I really like salads, and I don’t cook. I mean, I’ll cook if I have to, but why should I when my spouse is my personal chef? And here’s a fun fact about salads — they’re good for you. OK, I suppose that fact isn’t all that fun. Kind of sounds like the parental remonstrance every child hates to hear — “Be sure to eat all of your vegetables!” Believe, me, I understand the reluctance to embrace vegetables en masse. Brussel sprouts, asparagus — the green nemeses of my childhood. What I know now, that I didn’t know then, is that some greens require several introductions to the palate. In a way they’re just like people: some we like right away, some we learn to like over time, and some, well, some never make it past “hello.” Beets are like that for me; I no longer speak to beets, yet somehow I carry on.

Despite the fact that quite a few of the recipes in this week’s title include beets, I’m still a fan of Brother Victor-Antoine’s heavenly “Twelve Months of Monastery Salads.”

I find that I appreciate his seasonal approach to the salad menu. For October the choices include Crunchy Couscous Salad, Cooked Fennel Salad, Avocado and Watercress Salad, Persimmon and Greens Salad, as well as many others.

If you can’t imagine anything beyond a cranberry Jell-O salad during December, get ready for a savory group of non-gelatin delights. With fifteen recipes available for the last month of the year — including Indian Curried Lentil Salad and Immaculata Salad (made with Boston lettuce, arugula, green apples, almonds, and blue cheese – yum!), you’ll have plenty of variety to go along with that gelatin salad you know you’re going to have to eat.

Of course spring and summer are the salad’s “salad days,” so be prepared to salivate (salad-ivate?) while perusing April through August. No doubt about it — I’ll be fixing salads “out of season” (and I hope you will, too.) April’s “Sevilla Salad” with oranges sounds delicious as does June’s “Valle d’Aosta Salad” prepared with fennel bulbs, radishes, Gruy?re cheese, black olives, and scallions, dressed with a light vinaigrette.

And please don’t forget salads in January, that cold, gray, post-holiday month. Just when you think you can’t possibly eat another stew or pot of bean soup, open up this divine salad guide and add a Baby Spinach and Orange Salad or a Pear, Endive, and Brie Salad to your greens-deprived January menu.

If ever a cookbook deserved blessings, it most assuredly would be “Twelve Months of Monastery Salads.” Perhaps even those unfriendly beets will somehow convince me to give them a ninth or tenth chance.


Jan Johnston is the collection development coordinator for the Fort Vancouver Regional Library District. Email her at readingforfun@fvrl.org.

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