Eastwood H. - A Salad for All Seasons

Salad is the perfect fast food its fresh, delicious, colourful and healthy and is now rightfully top of the menu. In A Salad for All Seasons , Harry Eastwood shakes things up, introducing over 100 tasty, original and easy salads to enjoy all year.

Spring and Summer are packed with vibrant, exciting recipes that can be put together in minutes, such as Peach and Mozzarella with Sweet Chilli and Tomato Glaze and Thai Beef and Basil with Glass Noodles , while Autumn and Winter offer hearty, soothing, nourishing combinations, such as Roasted Squash with Thyme and Taleggio and Spinach, Lamb and Fig with Orange and Honey Dressing .

From well-loved favourites to exotic delights inspired by Harrys travels and love of fresh ingredients, A Salad for All Seasons is the ultimate proof that natural, fresh and nutritious food can also be a feast the whole year round.

Contents

List of Recipes

When I was a little girl growing up in France, I hankered after two British staples: white plastic bread and iceberg lettuce. My grandparents used to take my sister Georgie and me to the cinema in Bognor Regis as a treat. We lunched in a caff where they served cheese sandwiches with a side salad, followed by a cup of tea and a chocolate digestive all for under 10 between the four of us. I remember the salad because it was so different to French salads, being made up of iceberg lettuce and soggy tomatoes with salad cream artfully draped over the top. In England twenty years ago thats pretty much what salads looked like wherever you went how things have changed!

To me, a salad is now characterized by a couple of key words: imagination, simplicity and fresh, seasonal ingredients. I eat a different salad every single day. Some days Im using warmed-up leftovers and some days Im crunching down on mostly leaves. Some days its a side salad and some days its the main event. I regularly make salads for dinner parties, as well as for TV suppers on my own. The joy of a salad is that it can be made up from almost anything and it will always provide you with a healthy, colourful and fun food experience.

A Salad for All Seasons is a book you will eat with your eyes, a book of recipes that will get your heart beating faster because not only are the recipes exciting and beautiful, they are also quick and do-able .

My aim in this book has been to share my love of salad and of eating delicious food that also makes you feel good.

I like the fact that most of the salads in this book will effortlessly give you two or more of your five-a-day the fun way! To make things easier, you will find the magic number at the top of each recipe. The really virtuous salads (the ones that are lowest in calories and highest in vegetables) can be identified by a little halo symbol. There are twenty-one of these dotted throughout the book.

With this in mind, this book is full of ideas and recipes to inspire you to make salads a regular part of your life too. Apart from being delicious, salads are also a way of looking at leaves and vegetables in a fresh, new light. At the end of this introduction, I have included a small selection of my favourite seasonal leaves to look out for and a brief note on how to best use them in your recipes. Some of these leaves and shoots will already be familiar to you, but hopefully some wont. The recipes in this book are as much about new ways of looking at familiar ingredients as they are ideas and techniques I have been gathering together from all over the world of food.

My only rule when cooking is to make food that excites, delights and nourishes me. In A Salad for All Seasons you can expect to find recipes that are simple, delicious and ready in five minutes, like Grilled Avocado and Cherry Tomato with Lime and Coriander , as well as recipes like Southern Salad with Root Beer Brisket that benefit from being made the day before. You will find salads inspired from my travels abroad, like Thai Beef and Basil with Glass Noodles , and some that remind me of home, like English Garden Salad of Peas, Shoots, Smoked Trout and Horseradish . There are classic salad combinations such as Roast Chicken Caesar Salad as well as outlandish ones like A Salad of Mushrooms and Deep-fried Egg . I have included a Store-cupboard Salad for each season, as well as a handful of fruit salads. All the recipes in this book rely on seasonal ingredients because, when it comes to salads, its all about fresh, lively ingredients in their prime.

A lot of the recipes naturally sprang up vegetarian more by accident than by design. I found that at least half the recipes I dreamt up just happened not to include meat. They didnt seem to need any extra gilding once the right vegetables, textures and dressing had come together. Even in salads that include meat, you will often find a vegetarian variation at the end of the recipe. This is partly because salads are inherently versatile and partly because eating meat is a personal choice. I respect that a large number of people are cutting back on their meat consumption for ecological, ethical and health reasons.

Salad leaves and dressings require the same careful pairings as the Italians give to pasta shapes and sauce. Indeed, dressing clings to leaves in much the same way and an overdressed, soggy salad is a drab, sad sight.

Dressing is exactly the right word in the context of a salad, because a different vinaigrette can completely alter the look, taste and texture of a plate of leaves. The brilliant news here is that you can tip a bag of mixed leaves into a bowl and add four different dressings on four different days and experience an entirely different meal each time. In addition to the dressings I have paired with each individual recipe, I have included a set of four different stock vinaigrettes to use on your own salad recipes (see ).

There are many wonderful vinegars and glazes already available in most supermarkets and delis, but they tend to be rather expensive. For the gourmets amongst you, or for those who, like me, enjoy giving presents Ive made myself, there is also a section with recipes for home-made infused vinegars Raspberry , Honey and Tarragon , Thyme and Tangerine or Cucumber and Pink Peppercorn which will spruce up even the simplest salad .

Glazes are a fantastic way of jazzing up a last-minute salad or a warm plate of vegetables and you will find three different recipes for home-made glazes .

Pestos are often overlooked as a great way of dressing salads, especially vegetarian salads or those that include fish. , you will also find recipes for Hazelnut Pesto , Red Pepper Pesto and Lime and Coriander Pesto . Once made, I use them as dips and as sauces for pasta, as well as a fabulous way of pepping up a simple salad.