Salad Freak: Recipes to Feed a Healthy Obsession

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This was very bougie. While many of the recipes for the dressings were creative and tasty sounding, many, many ingredients for the salads themselves might be hard to source for many readers who don’t have easy and consistent access to farmers markets or…actual grocery stores themselves. Food deserts are real, after all.

Salad Freak: Recipes to Feed a Healthy Obsession|Hardcover Salad Freak: Recipes to Feed a Healthy Obsession|Hardcover

RF: Your love for seasonal cooking really comes through in the book. Do you have a go-to salad for every season? RF: We’re sharing your Matzo Fattoush recipe, which I'm so excited about. Can you tell me about the inspiration there? JD: It's so funny, one of the salads that I make the most often has lettuce. There's a Little Gem salad with a creamy lemon dressing and whatever sort of herbs I happen to have around. [​Editors’ note: If you’re looking for this recipe in Salad Freak , it’s Little Gem With Creamy Dressing, Hazelnuts & Petals.] The dressing is two ingredients: jarred mayo and lemon juice, and it's so good. I love that one because it's really adaptable to whatever else you have on hand. In the summer, definitely throw some tomatoes and cucumbers on there. It's so easy and crunchy and fresh. A lot of her ingredients are also expensive. She uses the justification that the salads are only a few ingredients so they need to be good since you’ll really taste them. Sure - but 84% butterfat butter for a salad? Further, a lot of these ingredients are only available at more bougie stores or farmers markets. I started just taking all the scraps home and surviving off those scraps and making my own meals. And slowly but surely, everything I make came to be a kind of a salad. I just love to eat as many vegetables as possible with a little bit of protein. And I think in the book, I really stretch the definition of a salad. It's not just going to Sweetgreen and getting a huge bowl of kale, it's anytime you're eating in that style of just ‘light, fresh, and truly delicious.’RF: I really like the concept of ‘anything can be a salad,’ because it's kind of true. It doesn't have to be lettuce with stuff on top of it. The Best Sitcoms on Netflix Right Now (October 2023) By Garrett Martin and Paste Staff October 20, 2023 | 12:00pm

Recipes from the New Book, Salad Freak by Jess Damuck

RF: We’re also sharing another recipe of yours that isn’t in the book, but would be great for Passover, Natural Wine Charoset. Can you tell me about that one? Things I was less wild about: It's totally bougie. Like, there are play lists involved, mindfulness reminders, things like that. How I eat my salad and how the author eats her salad can be two totally different ways - like she's talking about mindful chopping, and maybe I'm angry and want to rage chop? Either way is OK (I think). And unless you've got some really unique suggestions (like Marcus Samuelsson does in some of his books), I don't want to know what you're listening to.In the winter it's definitely chicories and citrus. Especially when I'm in New York in the winter. It's funny because I think that people who are new to cooking seasonally don't realize that citrus is such a winter thing. And it is such a gift. Such a bite of sunshine when we all really, really need it. The roasted cauliflower with almonds, anchovies, and herb recipe was what is making me throw this book out, mainly the dressing which I thought I would like (I like anchovies! I like dates! But together I found it to be disgusting!). I'm not even finishing the recipe - typing this while I have the cauliflower roasting in the oven but am 100% going to repurpose it to a completely different meal. A Love Letter to I’m Sorry and a Tribute to Funny Moms in 3 Bits By Annie Berke September 6, 2023 | 11:48am

Salad Game, According to America’s Favorite How to Up Your Salad Game, According to America’s Favorite

Some of the recipes are laughably simple. I'm all for simple, but a recipe for scooping balls of melon? No herbs, salt, nada. Sure there's a nice anecdote to go with it, but scooping balls of melon is not a recipe (at least not to me). Neither is adding some edible flowers to tomatoes. In summary the cookbook does not contain recipes with ingredients many people can readily get their hands on or likely afford! The "What to Have on Hand, Always" is not your typical list of pantry items. Roasted pumpkin seed oil, toasted walnut oil, pomegranate molasses, yuzu kosho, saffron, za'atar- these are not easy to find items. Not to mention the cost of keeping the 10 recommended cheeses and over a dozen seeds and nuts on hand. Many of the ingredients are not readily found in our local grocery stores - puntarelle (chicory), endive and radicchio can be grown here but there is not the demand to keep them on the shelves. (I live in a city of over 100,000 people so we are not talking just one local grocery store). Perhaps if I lived in a different part of the continent, closer to where the cook book author resides, the recipes would be more relevant. I got this from my local library (in Idaho!) and tons of this doesn't apply since the ingredients just aren't available, or are too specialized. I really wish books would push for local foods (local Idaho oils include canola, safflower, mustard, rapeseed, sunflower, and flax), rather than telling everyone to buy the same stuff from a place in Europe or South America.As someone who previously thought of salads as pretty uninteresting, I enjoyed this book! It feels nice to be excited about salad.