IntroductionWe’re baaaaaaack!
First things first: thank you to everyone who bought our first cookbook
Mandy’s Gourmet Salads: Recipes for Lettuce and Life. We have been completely overwhelmed by the response and have loved seeing all the Mandy’s salads being made at home across Canada and beyond. It’s been both humbling and completely inspiring, and that’s why we wanted to give you more salad recipes, more dressings, more sweets . . . more Mandy’s!
Our first book was all about our signature salads, the menu mainstays since our opening day in the early 2000s. And now that you have the essentials, we’re giving you (a lot) more recipes so you can kick your salad game up a notch. In this book you’ll find two main themes. The first, as you may have guessed from the cover, is fall. Our first book was published in summer, so for this one we really want to focus on celebrating seasonal goodness from September until May . . . which, yes, makes up most of the Canadian calendar year. It’s all about bringing you brightness, hits of citrus and veg, and inspiration for pantry creativity in those colder months, when we tend to all run a bit low. This is also why we’re bringing you close to 20 soup recipes too, to keep you healthy—and not reaching for the same pre-packaged boxes from the freezer night after night.
Our second theme is international flavors. Increased international flavors are something we’ve been progressively showcasing in our monthly salads. Each month we aim to come up with a new recipe and a way to bring new flavor combos to the menu. For inspiration, we rely on our past travels, our city of Montreal, and brainstorming with our staff. This is one of the best parts of our job, as we get to explore our local community grocery stores, find traditional ingredients that are new to us, and then wax poetic about them on our menu. We’re loving our Island Chicken Salad, for example (page 95), Jerk-Spiced Shrimp Salad, and Spicy Kani Salad, and we hope you do too. The Island Rice and Beans recipe alone was our recipe tester Kendra’s favorite discovery. It’s wildly addictive! Which brings us to another point: more so than in the first book, you’ll find a lot of salad additions in this book that work as standalone dishes. The Satay Mock Chicken, Pikliz, Ras el Hanout Vegan Crumble, Ba-corn. . . these are all additions to salads that also work great on their own.
A rule of thumb as you use this book . . . There really are no rules! The suggested salad and dressing combinations on the following pages (and that we sell in our shops) are simply that: suggestions. You’re always welcome to customize and mix and match when you come to one of our salad bars, and obviously that goes for in your home too. Enjoy!
xo, Mandy + Becca
Fall 2022
Copyright © 2022 by Mandy Wolfe, Rebecca Wolfe and Meredith Erickson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
