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(More customer reviews)Marcel Desaulniers, author of some of the most wickedly good dessert cookbooks in my cupboard, releases a cookbook full of more virtuous dishes, probably for those of us who've indulged one time too many in his myriad chocolate desserts.
One thing I particularly like about this book is the serving sizes. Unlike many cookbooks, where the number of servings listed is sometimes (or usually) optimistic, when a recipe in THIS book lists 4 servings, it means 4 VERY generous servings. Also, love or hate the ingredients that go into the salads, all of them turn out looking so delicious that it's (ironically) almost a shame to eat them.
Be warned, however - I would NOT recommend this cookbook to beginners. It can take several hours to prepare one of these salads. When I purchased it, I was expecting dozens of recipes for salads consisting of 6 or 7 ingredients, tops, which you can toss together and serve with a dressing. Wrong. Many of these salad recipes are actually 2 to 4 small recipes combined into one dish (even more if you decide to compliment the salad with the extra "variation" recipes), and the number of different ingredients required for these recipes easily goes from 12-15. Also, many of these ingredients are not things casual cooks will have lying around the house (I have no idea where to find Moutarde de Meaux Pommery mustard), so you have to specifically be in the mood to make a certain salad - you can't just whip one of them together right when you come home from work. Rainy weekends are ideal for many of these recipes.
One thing that I don't believe this book tells you (I may be mistaken), but which many people should guess anyway, is that all of the pasta recipes in this book can easily be substituted with the plain dry kind you buy in supermarkets. If the pasta is flavored (green onion fettucini, for example), you can simply add a bit of the herb/vegetable that was to go in the pasta directly into the salad.
One minor quibble with this book is that compared to other books by this author, there doesn't seem to be as many recipes, perhaps because due to the fact that each salad recipe is composed of several smaller recipes. Most of these are quite good, and the dressing recipes can obviously be made on their own for every day salads. Also, a grilled lemon chicken breast recipe accompanying one of the pasta salad recipes makes an outstanding ciabatta sandwich. In the end, the recipe(s) that make up one salad can often be made on their own for any number of occasions, which is a major plus.
Overall, the salad recipes as a whole are too difficult to make for me to recommend it to beginners, but cooking enthusiasts and/or people looking for substantial, nutritious meals should definitely give it a whirl!
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