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.