Lettuce Riot

Your new go-to guide to shaking up your salads for maximum flavor 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 color 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-color 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

Mobilize (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”