'Vegetarian Salad for Dinner' is the cookbook you want to use all summer

By Michelle Huneven

June 15, 2023 6 AM PT

A dozen years ago, when my husband and I decided to stop eating red meat at home, I was faced with two challenges: how to compose meals without the centerpiece of meat, and how to get big flavors into meat-free cooking. After all, meat, so umami-rich, so easy to cook — fry a lamb chop, grill a skirt steak — makes cooking dinner so quick and delicious.

A woman stands in a kitchen, windows behind and salads in big bowls on the counter in front of her

I’ve since assembled an arsenal of flavor enhancements: chile crisp, zhoug, fish sauce-infused Red Boat salt, miso, smoked paprika, sambal oelek, yuzu paste, even, yes, MSG. But recently, I’ve more than doubled my flavor hacks thanks to an inventive new cookbook from Jeanne Kelley, “Vegetarian Salad for Dinner.”

It’s a one-subject cookbook: plant-based dinner salads only. No appetizers. No desserts. The chapters include classic leafy-green salads, grain salads, pulse salads, salads with seeds, pasta salads, bread salads, roasted and toasted salads and, at the end, toppings, sauces and spreads.

Each recipe is labeled according to its ingredients: black rice, snap peas, pea sprouts, black garlic tofu or dandelion greens, roasted potatoes, romesco. The complexity and sophistication of the salads are immediately apparent; indeed, the photographs show inventive, busy dishes. But the writing is clear, the instructions easy to follow. Don’t be intimidated.

I recently went to cook and eat with Kelley at her home — the food writer’s version of an interview.

Vivacious, easygoing and warm, Kelley lives in Eagle Rock, just blocks from the community garden that her husband helped found and where they both have plots. Kelley has written six other cookbooks too and was the first full-time recipe tester hired after Bon Appétit built its test kitchen in Los Angeles. She worked there for 20 years, until the magazine moved its operations to New York. Two decades of cooking whatever the writers threw at her has given Kelley deep experience and range. These days, when she’s not writing a cookbook, she says, she’s a busy freelance food writer, consultant and food stylist.

Roasted beets, citrus, labneh and zhoug by Jeanne Kelley, author of Vegetarian Salad for Dinner.

Kelley’s previous salad cookbook is the decidedly non-veg “Salad for Dinner,” published in 2012. The intervening 11 years have clearly been ones of experimentation and creativity in plant-based cooking.

“Vegetarian Salad for Dinner” is generally geared toward lacto-ovo vegetarians, but it also includes many vegan recipes and options. Kelley herself is a “flexitarian,” in that she’ll try the meaty local specialty when traveling and eat whatever a host serves her. She grows many of her greens and vegetables and has a small flock of happy hens.

In her pretty, high-ceilinged kitchen, where the book’s 80 recipes were born, we got to work. I sliced and chopped, and sliced and chopped, while Kelley cooked grains and made dressings. We were preparing three salads, all chosen because she had (almost all) the ingredients on hand. Her husband, Martin, was intermittently sent to the garden for greens and herbs.

Each recipe we made reflected a different corner of the world. The red quinoa and red kidney bean masala was a juicy, wildly flavorful and many-textured take on Indian street snacks. The gluten-free beet, buckwheat, walnuts, greens, goat Gouda salad had an Eastern European edge: Kasha meets borscht. Kelley borrowed the rich, nutty muhammara recipe from Reem Kassis’ “The Palestinian Table” as the base for a dinner salad with lentils and a refreshing garden-inspired slaw.

Hands preparing a large bowl of chopped salad.

The salads were so numerous in their sensations that we didn’t notice a lack of pomegranate seeds or a missing half teaspoon of garam masala. “I’m very careful when writing a recipe,” Kelley says, “but flexible when making one.”

That Kelley is a careful calibrator of flavor and texture became clear as I cooked through the book. Each recipe is balanced in flavor and texture: savory and sweet, spicy and cooling while also crisp, chewy, velvety and juicy. I tend to trust my own instincts, so when making the zucchini and freekeh salad with za’atar, halloumi, I decided that the dressing had too much lemon and added some salt and oil to correct it. Later, when my husband and I were eating the finished salad, guess what it needed? More … lemon.

“Vegetarian Salad for Dinner” is not a beginner’s cookbook. In terms of difficulty, it’s on a par with most of Yotam Ottolenghi’s cookbooks. All the salads are componential; some are quite complex and time-consuming. It’s good to remember that each recipe is an entire meal. Store-bought washed and bagged greens, where possible, do save time.

A woman in a kitchen leans over a bowl of salad on a counter.

Kelley, like many of us adventurous cooks, knows all the markets within driving radius of her home. Middle Eastern, Asian, Italian and Indian markets, Trader Joe’s, high-end gourmet shops and local farmers markets are all in her bailiwick. When trying out her recipes for myself, I often have to run out for an ingredient — halloumi cheese, fresh pistachios, labneh, black rice.

Some of Kelley’s recipes are faster to make than others. The chickpeas, cauliflower, tomato, sumac yogurt involves easy sheet-pan roasting and a quick stir of sumac into yogurt. And once you’ve thin-sliced a pound of Brussels sprouts and poached two eggs, the warm Brussels sprout Caesar, poached egg is a snap.

The roasted beets, citrus, labneh, zhoug, with its deep reds and oranges, snowy white labneh and puddles of deep green zhoug, its sensational Yemeni sauce flavored with cardamom, chiles and cumin, couldn’t be prettier or more delicious. One dinner guest texted the next day: “That was as good a salad as I’ve ever had in my life.”

Especially ambitious — and time-consuming — are the chopped salads. Both took hours. For the chopped salad, migas, Spanish goodies, I first made the migas — large garlicky bread crumbs. Then, I spent way too much time obsessively rubbing the translucent little jackets off a can’s worth of chickpeas; most jackets came off with a towel rub, but the rest required pea-by-pea attention. (Seasonings, Kelley asserts, stick better to naked chickpeas.) As soon as the chickpeas went in the oven, I chopped. And chopped. I chopped green apples, Manchego cheese, baby bell peppers, onion and almonds. I washed and dried lettuce. But when I set the finished salad on an Oscar party buffet, compliments began within 30 seconds: “It’s spicy and sweet and crunchy and … luscious,” said one guest.

A bowl of chopped salad with "Spanish goodies"

The seasoned, roasted chickpeas really did capture the taste of Spanish chorizo.

“Vegetarian Salad for Dinner” is an invaluable resource for plant-based flavor hacks — those seasoned chickpeas would also be good in pastas or atop a soup. Kelley’s recipes for zhoug and the Egyptian spice mix dukkah are alone worth the price of the book. So is the last chapter of toppings, sauces, spreads. An easily made cashew cream can replace goat cheese, burrata and ricotta to turn many recipes vegan. Dozens of carefully crafted salad dressings are embedded in the recipes.

I’ve cooked at least one recipe from each chapter and am hard-pressed to choose a favorite. Contenders include the showstopper roasted beets, citrus, labneh, zhoug; the smoky, chewy, lemony zucchini and freekeh salad with za’atar, halloumi; and the salade ‘gratinée’ with roasted fingerlings, red onions — another fast sheet-pan meal where crisp potatoes are topped with “robust” dressed greens and grated Gruyère, then quickly broiled until the cheese melts and the greens are just softened: Now this is a recipe truly greater than the sum of its parts.

“Vegetarian Salad for Dinner” contains about 80 well-tested recipes. Its range and complexity are wide, even a little awe-inspiring. But the directions are easy to follow, the techniques educational and enriching, and the results always well worth the time required to produce them … so long as you don’t let those chickpeas take over your life.