The Perfectly Tossed Salad: Fresh, Delicious and Endlessly Versatile

Everyone loves a salad - full of fresh ingredients, simple to throw together when you're short of time and packed with nutrient-rich fruit and vegetables and lean protein and nuts. However, salads can often start to feel repetitive, high on virtue but low on appeal. In The Perfectly Tossed Salad , Mindy Fox shows that this is simply down to a lack of imagination and her recipes prove just what a humble salad is capable of. Capitalising on the huge variety available to us, Mindy conjures up pitch-perfect flavour combinations - watermelon and feta, celeriac and orange - and really gets creative. Salads like Warm Roasted Squash with Baby Leaf, Roasted Lemon and Spiced Pecan, or Wholemeal Pasta with Chicken, Capers, Ricotta and Marjoram can be a substantial meal or a light lunch, and Clams with Spinach, Spanish Ham and Sweet Shallot is certainly not out of place on a dinner party menu. With all this mouthwatering variety and versatility at hand, it's nice to think how good for us it all is too!

Mindy Fox is the food editor of the US magazine La Cucina Italiana and a former editor at Saveur. She has written for many magazines in the US, including Every Day with Rachael Ray, and collaborated on a number of cookery books, including New York Times Notable Book of 2009, The Craft of Baking with Karen DeMasco and The Perfectly Roasted Chicken.