I like rooting for the underdog, so I was going to report that Raising the Salad Bar is from a small press I’d never heard of but which does a convincing Chronicle Books knockoff: good recipes, good design.

It turns out the publisher, Lake Isle Press, puts out the collected works of Rachael Ray. So, not exactly the underdog. But _Salad Bar_ is great. It’s a salad book that is not a health food book, and the recipes are impressively diverse:

* Steamed mussels with garlic croutons and micro-greens
* Mixed greens and radicchio salad with grilled sliced steak
* Cajun shrimp and corn salad with lime-chile dressing
* Bibb, watercress, and endive salad with pears, walnuts, and pomegranate seeds

The photos are appealing, and it’s a catchy title. If you’re looking to expand your salad repertoire, as I always am, check it out–I found it at the public library, but I’ll probably buy it.

Here’s a tip. I found out about this book through the Seattle Public Library’s [new nonfiction RSS feed](http://catalog.spl.org/lists/newest-nonfiction/rss/). Every time they put a new nonfiction book out on the shelf, it goes into the feed. This sounds unmanageable, but it’s never more than 25 books in a day, and it’s very easy to zip past titles I’m not interested in, such as this actual example from today:

> The house that cleans itself by Clark, Mindy Starns. ( Harvest House Publishers ). More than a how-to book, “The House That Cleans Itself” looks at what God has to say about cleanliness and order, and how He can inspire order in every readers life in a fresh and unique way.

Libraries seem to standardize on the same software, so your library may well offer the same feature. I highly recommend it–I’ve learned about tons of great new books this way. Now I have to go do some filing, lest I be struck by lightning.