Ladle, Leaf, & Loaf

Soup, Salad, and Bread for Every Season
by Lisa Cowden (Houghton Mifflin)

A bowl of chunky vegetable soup, a hunk of French bread and a crisp green salad with oil and vinegar: good. A bowl of roasted red pepper soup with crisp julienned potatoes, a cornmeal popover with lemon-honey butter and a garden salad with tarragon vinaigrette and herb and cheese croutons: better.

Lisa Cowden has pulled out her salad spinner, soup pots and loaf pans to put a new spin on the well-loved soup and salad meal. In her book, she's got 11 other spiffy menus just like that (and hundreds more when you figure out your own combinations) which just may tempt you to give heavier meals the heave-ho for good.

Cowden also illustrated her book. Her illustrations have been published in the New York Times and she's been a dinnerware designer for Corning. Judging from her book, she's also pretty handy with the kind of Corningware that goes in the oven and on the stovetop. If the busy career woman filled her nights with meals of soup, salad and bread, we're now the beneficiaries. Choices like spinach and onion soup with rosemary-walnut dumplings, red and yellow tomato soup with broiled tomatoes and carrot soup with Vidalia onion and sesame are filling, nutritious and packed with flavor.

Cowden gives you simple recipes for making your own chicken, beef or fish stock and vegetable consomm� or permits using canned. There's so much flavor in the additional ingredients in most of the soups that the difference between using homemade stock and canned is negligible.

Salads are varied and delicious. Some standouts: from the grains, dried beans and pasta section, wild rice salad with walnut oil and lemon dressing gets further enhancement from chopped pistachios and baby peas; from the seafood section, mussel salad with poppy seed dressing gets its delicious start with lemon rind, lemon juice and the mussels cooking in two cups of dry vermouth; from the root vegetable section, root vegetable slaw with creamy caraway dressing is punched up with julienned carrots, parsnip and rutabaga rather than slaw's traditional cabbage.

For many diners, meals made from Cowden's soups and salads would be filling enough. If you feel up to making your own bread accompaniment, though (which certainly could be done ahead of time, as could most of the soups and some of the salads), she gives some good selections. (And often doesn't stop there, since many are presented with their own butters and spreads as companions.) Cardamom raisin bread, for instance, gets slathered with hazelnut butter, which Cowden flavors with cinnamon and honey. Her blue cornbread, spicy soda bread and buttermilk biscuits mingle with cilantro-jalapeno butter. Her pesto cheese spread is just the ticket for her forty-clove garlic bread or onion or sesame flatbreads. Whoever said a meal of soup, salad and bread isn't satisfying certainly never met Lisa Cowden.