Lettuce Riot

Your new go-to guide to shaking up your salads for maximum flavour impact.

Move over, basic iceberg lettuce with ranch dressing; the world is tired of your sad, restrictive, and out-of-season leaves and ready for vibrant texture, diverse ingredients, and riotous colour and texture. This cookbook focuses on the pure joy of protein-rich dinner salads in all their forms—asking, “What even is a salad?” (The answer, of course, is you can’t pin salad down! You must surrender to its ineffability.)

With 50 recipes de-emphasizing a greens-based salad (think dense bean salads and taco salads!), plenty of wry humor and wordplay, protein counts of each recipe backed by a nutritionist, 35 full-colour photos, and humorous margin doodles, author Becky Selengut (Misunderstood Vegetables) brings lightness and fun to a once-derided mainstay of the dinner table.

Chapters include:

Groundwork (classics with a twist)

Salt and vinegar potato salad with dill pickles and potato chips

Cobb Salad with Katsu Tofu

Mobilise (transport-friendly salads that get better with time)

Chickpea chopped salad with chorizo, olives, almonds, fennel, piquillos and sherry vinegar dressing

Grilled Chicken and Charred Corn with Lime, Chili, Cilantro, and Cotija

Revolution (outside-the-box, or bag, salads)

Buffalo Cauliflower, Chickpea, and Tempeh Salad with Red Cabbage and Blue Cheese Dressing

Jewish Deli Salad with Pickled Beets, Lox, Dill, Capers, Bagel Croutons, and Everything Spice

Get Dressed (mix-and-match dressings)

Roasted shallot vinaigrette with balsamic

Greenest Goddess dressing

Top That! (easy, crunchy, chewy, texturally contrasting toppers)

Crispy Spiced Chickpeas

Shiitake Mushroom “Bacon”