Salad for dinner always sounds virtuous, but not necessarily all that fulfilling (or just plain filling at all). Flipping through Mindy Fox's most recent cookbook Salads: Beyond the Bowl, it's clear that Fox, who is the food editor at La Cucina Italiana magazine, is trying to stretch the definition of what a salad can be. It's also refreshing that her range of flavors goes way beyond Italian food, like in this twist on Asian sesame noodles. More

The idea of a salad with grilled meat, cilantro, and mint, dressed with a pungent mixture of fish sauce, chiles, sugar, and lime juice, is something I first discovered at a Thai restaurant where I live in Chicago. Known as larb in Thai and Laotian cuisine with variations throughout Asia, it's unlike any style of salad you'd encounter in Western cooking: for one, the dressing has no oil or fat in it whatsoever. Flipping through one of my favorite cookbooks of all time recently, Nigel Slater's The Kitchen Diaries, led me to this rendition. More

Spring is here and with it comes many stalks of wonderfully green asparagus, and while we love them simply steamed, drowned with hollandaise, or topped off with a wobbly poached egg, we're thinking this Asparagus Kerabu from Zak Pelaccio's Eat with Your Hands might just be our new asparagus go-to for the season. More

This Hanger Steak Salad from Zak Pelaccio's Eat with Your Hands isn't much of a salad at all. It's really slices of beefy hanger steak dressed roaring hot with a Southeast Asian dressing and a handful of basil and cilantro. But there's no need to argue semantics when a steak or salad or whatever you want to call it, is this good. The real takeaway here is steak plus fish sauce and chiles equals awesome. More

Equal parts salad salad and fruit salad, this Honeydew Salad with Poppy Seed Dressing from Cheryl Sternman Rule's Ripe is going to be seeing quite a lot of action over the spring and summer months. More

For those not familiar with the versatility of bean curd, Andrea Nguyen's is the best kind of eye opener. With recipes like this White Tofu, Sesame, and Vegetable Salad, she eases readers into the realization that tofu is not just a pallid meat replacer. Instead it's an ingredient to be embraced, worked into all sorts of varied dishes, acting as everything from the main event to a base for an intriguing salad dressing. More

In My Pizza, Jim Lahey has included recipes for many of the fabulous non-pizza menu items at his New York pizzeria Co., including this fascinating Radicchio Salad. It's a salad full of bitter, earthy flavors interspersed with creamy-pungent bites of Taleggio and bursts of sweet-sour balsamic vinegar. We're not quite sure how Lahey decided that radicchio, shiitakes, and Taleggio work on the same plate, but we're pretty pleased that he's passed along this unexpectedly but really quite wonderful combo to us. More

At most Thai joints, the papaya salad is rarely one of the more memorable plates. Swimming in a cloyingly sugary dressing or wilted beyond recognition, these sub-par salads do nothing to showcase the vibrancy of a truly exemplary Green Papaya Salad. To experience the salad the way it's meant to be enjoyed, we turn to Tom Vandenberghe and Eva Verplaetse, the Thai food-loving co-authors of Bangkok Street Food. More

Isan, a rural area located in northeastern Thailand, is a place where salad magic happens. It's the birthplace of the wonderfully fresh green papaya salad as well as meatier options like this Grilled Beef Salad. Adapted from Bangkok Street Food by Tom Vandenberghe and Eva Verplaetse, this salad is best enjoyed with chargrilled tenderloin but a stovetop sear will do the trick in a pinch. More

I suppose just about everyone at this point has encountered the beet, goat cheese, and spinach salad. It is one of the most prevalent salads around, on countless menus, and for good reason—all the components work incredibly well together. But that doesn't mean you can't improve on a good thing, which is the cue for this recipe from Plenty by London chef Yotam Ottolenghi. More