Satisfying breadsalad practically a meal

There’s something devilishly satisfying about bread salads, especially this one from the outstanding seasonal cookbook, Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables (Artisan/Thomas Allen, $50). The salad is almost a meal in itself, with its bounty of colourful peppers and accents provided by garlic, mozzarella cheese and optional chopped salami.

U.S. chef Joshua McFadden has divided the vegetable year into six seasons by declaring summer has three (early, middle and late). He would like us to learn to eat seasonally by visiting farmers’ markets and produce-conscious stores and trying what’s new and what’s in season.

Also, try eating vegetables raw to better taste their fine points, says the chef at Ava Gene’s in Portland, Ore.

This is a handsome and informative book packed with tips as simple as how to toast garlic in olive oil or salt eggplant, up to how to make what he claims is “the kale salad that started it all.”

That kale salad came about when, as chef at a Brooklyn restaurant, he was depressed one winter by mesclun greens and turned to kale for his salad.

Toss salads with clean hands, McFadden recommends.