Frisée

Buy cooked fresh lobster meat and you can whip this salad together in about 30 minutes. Cooking your own lobster, however, not only ensures the freshest flavor and the tenderest meat, but you get more bang for the buck—you can use the lobster shells to make stock and lobster oil.

Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less.

At her restaurant, Lynch includes black truffle in the vinaigrette for this salad, but it's so flavorful as it is that we didn't feel the truffle was necessary.

(Green Salad with Roquefort Toasts) Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less.

This recipe can be prepared in 45 minutes or less. The secret to this take on salad lyonnaise is very fresh eggs. If the slab bacon you're using is particularly lean, add 1 tablespoon vegetable oil to the skillet when cooking.

Active time: 15 min Start to finish: 15 min

Insalata di Radicchio, Frisée, e Carciofi Including raw artichokes in a salad is an Italian trademark — their flavor is fresher and milder than that of cooked artichokes. Active time: 40 min Start to finish: 1 hr

Judy Rodgers is currently working on a cookbook from her Zuni Café in San Francisco. Grilling the mushrooms for this salad (which will appear in the new book) intensifies their flavor. Active time: 35 min Start to finish: 35 min

Arugula's bold flavor and the texture of curly frisée team up in this simple salad.

Smoked duck adds elegance to this salad. Smoked turkey would also work well.

The greens for the following salad may be washed and spun dry a day in advance and kept wrapped in paper towels in a plastic bag and chilled. Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less.

When dressing a salad in the classic Italian style, each vinaigrette ingredient is tossed individually with the greens in a specific order, rather than being whisked together. Active time: 20 min Start to finish: 20 min

The chef's salad is a familiar yet fading star in the salad world. In delicatessens, diners, and airport snack bars everywhere, we find its faithful components: lifeless leaves of iceberg lettuce, suspiciously blue-hued slices of hard-boiled egg, wedges of pallid tomato, and rubbery chunks of cheese, ham, and turkey. To top it all off (or perhaps sitting alongside): gloppy, high-calorie dressing. But this still-beloved salad may have had a noble beginning. Though nobody has ever stepped forward to claim the title of the chef in "chef's salad," the dish has been attributed by some food historians to Louis Diat, chef of The Ritz-Carlton in New York City in the early 1940s. He paired watercress with halved hard-boiled eggs and julienne strips of smoked tongue, ham, and chicken. (The concept of the chef’s salad dates still earlier; one seventeenth-century English recipe for a "grand sallet" calls for lettuce, roast meat, and a slew of vegetables and fruits.) No matter how the salad has evolved, its underlying virtue remains unchanged. This is a no-cook meal that satisfies our cravings for greens and protein. And, in these dog days of summer-when cooking is sometimes the last thing we'd like to do-a main-course salad is especially appealing. In our updated take on the classic recipe, we used a selection of lettuces (early chef's salads were not always made with iceberg alone), and, in a twist on the norm, small but flavorful amounts of sugar-cured ham and Parmigiano-Reggiano. Feel free to improvise with ingredients depending on what looks good at your farmers market. Summer savory or dill can flavor the dressing in place of the mixed herbs, and many kinds of ham and cheese will work well.