Foreword

Lunchtime in our office typically resembles a salad buffet. Some bring ready-to-eat grain or bean salads, assembled over the weekend using components that will maintain their luster for several days. Others tote various bits and bobs with them for à la minute construction, which allows for ingredients—like soft young lettuces or thinly sliced prosciutto—that don’t hold up for many days. The team that compiled this book—our editorial team, or Team Salad as it’s known in the office—has its own particular ritual: Each person brings in whatever odds and ends are in the fridge at home, and then at lunchtime there is a brief frenzy of chopping and shaving and mixing in the staff kitchen before a magnificent salad materializes to be divvied up among the participants.

What have we learned from being bystanders and participants in this daily parade of colors and textures and acids and oils? That there are many ways to make salad a meal.

We started a column on the site back in 2013 called “Not Sad Desk Lunch”; the lunch salad is the embodiment of that movement. And yes, it is a movement—coming soon to a school or office near you. The point is to be thoughtful about lunch. Not to be fussy or take a lot of time with it, but to resist succumbing to the mind-numbing repetition of logging on to a food delivery service or grabbing the same sad sandwich on your way to work every morning.

Salads also make great one-bowl dinners. There’s no better solution to getting dinner on the table after a long day than mixing and matching components from your fridge to create a big, fresh salad. And it’s one of the best ways to breathe new life into leftovers such as roast chicken or grilled steak or vegetables.

In this book we give you sixty of our favorite salad recipes, but it doesn’t stop there. We’ve also included loads of tips, riffs, variations, and some ideas that we’re pretty sure you’ve never seen before. Grilled cheese croutons? Check. Hard-boiled egg as dressing component (this page)? Why not? Rice Krispies for crunch (this page)? Yep, we went there.

We hope you enjoy these mighty salads as much as we do. Here’s to fewer sad desk lunches for all!

—Amanda Hesser & Merrill Stubbs, founders of Food52