Jennifer ChandlerSimply Salads: More than 100 Delicious Creative Recipes Made from Prepackaged Greens and a Few Easy-to-Find Ingredients

I've never written a book review before, but I love this book so much that I was compelled to do so. This book is amazing! The recipes use easy to find ingredients, are simple to prepare, and flexible so its also easy to experiment. There is a picture of each and every salad. I particularly like the section on vinaigrettes and dressings at the end - it gives you the basics of dressing-making, and from there the sky's the limit.The confetti salad is to die for - tastes like french fries with ketchup - but you're eating SALAD! One of the other reviewers suggested adding shrimp to the mango and avocado salad. I tried this and it was nice, but I would recommend large grilled prawns on the side instead. The cilantro overpowered the mild taste of the shrimp and their delicate flavor got lost.As summer arrives I'm looking forward to trying out the slaw section - the pictures look amazing - and slaw really does get overlooked. I'm thinking Asian slaw with ginger dressing will go wonderfully with BBQ chicken. Or how about Memphis mustard slaw with a side of pulled pork? MMMM - can't wait!

"Simply Salads" is a book full of great salad recipes. I was hesitant to buy the book at first since the recipes used prepackaged greens. I have never, ever seen prepackaged greens that look very fresh, certainly not as fresh as what I see in the photographs (which are excellent -- lots of great pictures). I just decided to buy the greens fresh and make the salads by mixing the greens myself. I'm glad I did, and I found that Ms. Chandler had added the complete list of ingredients for each type of prepackaged green in the front of the book, which helped a lot. It was easy to make substitutions in various recipes. For instance, for the "Mandarin Orange Slaw" (which is delicious) I used fresh satsuma orange slices and fresh juice instead of the canned mandarin oranges and canned juice. I bought the greens that make up the Italian Blend and mixed them for the "Cheese Tortellini Salad with Sun-Dried Tomato Vinagrette" -- it was fantastic. This book is full of great recipes, and you can change them to suit your own tastes as I did. I would love to know, however, where the author finds those beautiful packaged greens... I wish we had them as nice as that in our stores! If you do have access to such things you will be able to make the salads very quickly, but I did not find it took that much time to do it from fresh, individual bunches of greens.

"Salad" is not necessarily synonymous with "healthy," which is something I should have considered before I purchased this book. The diet I'm currently on owes its success in large part to the fact that I eat salad for lunch every day. The reason I bought this book was because I was sick to death of eating the same boring salad and wanted some creative new ideas.If your motives are similar, you might be a little bit disappointed by this book, which has more than a few salads with rich, less-than-healthy ingredients and doesn't even include nutritional information in case you get caught out wondering if what you're about to eat is going to bust your diet for the week. It does, however, deliver my hoped-for trove of ideas for jazzing up a boring green salad.I use this book as inspiration, and have only faithfully made a few of the recipes. I substitute or omit a lot of ingredients because I have a pretty good handle on how many calories I can have and which foods provide too many. If you're following a strict diet, though, where you're counting every calorie and gram of fat this book may be more trouble than it's worth ... better to go with a title that promises more diet-friendly recipes.

_Simply Salads_ is number one for me. After using many salad books and having to make many separate recipes for each salad - this book comes along and tells you how to buy bags of pre-washed salad greens(yes, you can trust that- just check with the UC Berkeley newsletter who convinced me)and other pre-cut vegetables and add in easy ingredients that anyone can find and turn out really fantastic salads that the family will request over and over.The book is organized in an easy format first explaining all the salad blends, then the recipes are organized by poultry, meat, seafood, vegetable, fruit, bean,grain and pasta, and slaws, with a final chapter for vinaigrettes and dressings that is so good and so healthful that you will never go back to store bought. Easy too!Many of the salads are easily main course meals. My children love all the ones we have made and several are absolute favorites -like 'hearts of romaine with tart apples, hazelnuts and cheddar cheese (we use Pink Lady instead of Granny Smith); 'Asian noodle salad with peanut dressing'; 'creamy broccoli slaw'; and a strong favorite - 'chicken tostada salad'.Overall, this book is a great way to get the family to eat healthy foods and it is all made *so* easy. What more could you want?