"winter salad" news and stories

Each Thursday, we round up a selection of scrumptious links from our friends over at YumSugar. Here's what they've got cooking this week:

• If you still haven't recovered from the New Year's Eve hangover, try one of these salves.
• Kick off your post-holiday recovery with a winter salad.
• Do you dare cook plantains at home?
• A Mexican Christmas dinner is indeed traditional American.
• Start 2010 on the right foot with this mysterious piece of culinary tech.
• Will ramen finally graduate college, or will pho give it a failing grade?
• If you made a go-vegan resolution, why not munch on vanilla pound cake?

Call me crazy, but I never think of the winter being a time for salads. To me, the winter is for soups and hearty meals and hot meals and hot tea and hot chocolate. Salads are for the spring and summer, the time of leafy greens and lighter dinners. Christmas is for turkeys and hams and mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie.

But the people over at Cooks Recipes would certainly disagree with me. They've come up with a huge list of various salads that you can eat at Christmas. Most of them incorporate the flavors of the season, including the Cranberry Apple Salad, the Holiday Sweet Potato Salad, and Grandma's Winter Fruit Medley. Danish-Deli-Food.com has a Winter Salad made with figs, cabbage, oranges, and pecans that sounds interesting. But the Layered Lettuce Salad? Not festive enough.

Oh, and Ambrosia Mold sounds like the name of a Bond girl.