Award-winning author tackles idiot-proof salads

Hot summer evenings make a cool dinner salad with a glass of iced tea seem mighty appealing. If the ingredients have been already cleaned or chilled, that salad can easily be tossed together in a flash. Dress that salad with a low-fat, lower-calorie dressing, it can be a healthy meal, too.

Just in time for salad season comes "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Sensational Salads" by Leslie Bilderback. You may not have heard of Bilderback but she's loaded with serious credentials: Certified Master Baker, culinary teacher, California food service professional, author of five "Idiot's Guides", as well as the James Beard award-winning "The Secrets of Baking."

True to The Idiot's Guide cookbook series, Bilderback teaches us, step-by-step, to build praiseworthy salads and translates her extensive knowledge into a home kitchen without chef jargon. As a bonus, Bilderback's salads can be made with ingredients found in most home pantries and supermarkets. No trip to the specialty store or Internet order required.

Bilderback lays out fundamental salad elements in Salad Basics; covering greens, vegetables, fruits and tools and follows with dressing components such as vinegar, oil (including a concise breakdown of olive oil types from extra-virgin to light), emulsions (like mayonnaise); finishing with toppings like croutons, nuts and cheese.

This is no low-fat cookbook.

However, over the years I've shared and you've learned numerous ways to make salad dressings much lower in fat and calories. For example, you should know that slightly-thickened chicken (or vegetable) broth easily replaces over 90-percent of a dressing's oil (find the recipe in recipe archive at dailyherald.com/lifestyle/food), or using reduced-fat or fat-free mayo or sour cream. Those simple alternatives can easily be substituted in many of Bilderback's salads and dressings.

Skim Bilderback's book and you'll find nine recipes for potato salad including Sweet Potato and Pecan Salad, an intriguing Apple and Potato Salad and New Potato Vinaigrette (substitute my thickened chicken broth here). In the meat and seafood section you'll discover a dandy Deviled Ham Salad, Avocado Shrimp Salad and an Orange Chicken Salad. Japanese Soba Salad, Mediterranean Pasta Salad (you'll want to trim back the four ounces of goat cheese some) and Seafood Pasta Salad are in the pasta salad section while her grain-based salads use bulgur, wild rice and kasha (high-fiber, buckwheat groats). Sections on bean salads and dinner salads round it out.

Think of this book as an idea book, one you'll turn to again and again this summer to answer: "What'll I make tonight that's cool, delicious and healthy?" You'll agree that Bilderback is no idiot when it comes to salads.

Try this recipe: Here's a recipe from Bilderback's book. Even with the eggs, bacon and olive oil, it still comes in at less than 30-percent calories from fat.

• Write Don Mauer at don@theleanwizard.com.