Skip to main content

Book Review: Salad of the Day

 

Georgeanne Brennan has authored a new cookbook in 2012, Salad of the Day, 365 Recipes for Every Day of the Year. The chapters are laid out to follow the calendar year, with a large 2 page calendar spread at the beginning of each chapter giving a once glance view of the entire month’s recipes. In the subsequent pages of each chapter, Georgeanne provides the detailed recipes, including thoughtful comments. There are also many full page pictures of salads throughout the book.

I picked up this cookbook at Williams Sonoma in the beginning of April and have been cooking from it ever since. I love the organization of the recipes and I love that Georgeanne strives to highlight seasonal ingredients as we progress through the calendar year of recipes. I’ve made at least a dozen of her salads so far and I haven’t found one dud in the bunch yet! There are warm salads such as her Grilled Salmon, Potato, and Asparagus salad sprinkled throughout the cookbook and the cold salads are by no means traditional – every salad has a creative twist either in ingredients or presentation. The past two weeks have found me shopping for wheat berries, quinoa, pea shoots, green mangos, and more. Definitely not pedestrian.

I first heard of Georgeanne Brennan from my mother-in-law who has always wanted to take cooking lessons from Ms. Brennan out at her cooking studio and home in California. Unfortunately the weekend classes seem to fill within a day of being posted to her website and I’ve not been quick enough to snag reservations for us. Given how fantastic this cookbook is, I’m really keen to soak up some of her creative wisdom face to face now so I’ll be watching her website for openings in her classes a little more closely.

I think this cookbook would prove useful for just about everyone, including vegetarians and vegans. Granted it’s not strictly vegetarian but most of the salads are vegetarian or vegan and with simple adaptations they all can be. Brennan’s cookbook would also be great for those who want to eat healthier and incorporate greens and whole grains but have trouble coming up with ideas on how to do so, and more importantly how to do so deliciously. 365 different and delicious salads all at the ready and organized around seasonal ingredients. You really can’t do any better than that.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Board Game Review: Expeditions Gears of Corruption

L ast year I reviewed Expeditions and ranked it #1 among all Stonemaier games on account of the challenging intellectual puzzle it presents. This year I have played my way through the new expansion, Gears of Corruption , and I’m delighted to let you know that it makes the base game even better. That the expansion so cohesively builds on the base game should not be a surprise to anyone who closely examines the original box for Expeditions. All expansion components perfectly fit in that box including the 2 new mechs that nestle in the placeholder cubbies clearly made for them.  That can’t be coincidence. There might a few features rolled into Corruption of Gears that were developed as a result of consumer feedback on the base game (I’m looking at you, wild meeple), but my theory is that Stonemaier did a Lord of the Rings maneuver with this game and its expansions, designing the entire game with most of the additions integrated up front, and then breaking it into base + expansions fo...

Board Game Review: Expeditions

Expeditions is my favorite game in the Stonemaier Games portfolio to date. The game is a sequel to Scythe, and continues the narrative years in the future. It has taken everything I loved in Scythe and expanded on it, while chucking out everything I didn’t care for (the combat). Designed by Jamey Stegmaier, Expeditions brings us into an age when a meteorite has crash landed into Siberia and things begin to go sideways for all who encounter it. One team after another sets out to investigate the crash site and they are never heard from again. No one knows what happened to them. Now it’s our turn to find out what’s really going on, each of us leading a competing expedition team into Siberia to bring back desperately needed answers. During a game of Expeditions, all players are seated around the game board, which is made up of individually placed hex tiles laid out as shown above. At the bottom of the game board is an insert affectionately known as the base camp. The base camp holds ...

A Fortunate Trade, an Unexpected Pledge of Support, and a Win for Yin!

What follows is the true and unredacted account of my tour of duty as a command leader for the Yin Brotherhood. Map: 5p POK Kazadoom’s Notch Map generated on https://ti4-map-generator.derekpeterson.ca/ Factions: Yin, Yssaril, Nekro, Vuil’raith, Hacan. Round 1 objectives: Engineer a Marvel (R1-1); Push Boundaries (R1-2) Five experienced leaders gathered this weekend to prove themselves worthy. As the Yin, I found myself wedged between the Hacan (around the corner of a notch in the galaxy) and the Yssaril. Word had come down to the Blessed on Darien through our ambassadors and spies that both nearby factions were set on amassing larger fleets and armies, but to what end we were unsure. The Blessed discussed the matter at great length and decided our best defense was to rebuild our flagship the Van Hauge and to take control of as many planets as we could (more, at least, then our neighbors). That would allow us to stand firm in the face of any aggression. As a command leader, I...