Have you ever said salads are boring or yucky and ice cream's hard to make?

We hear you, and are happy our community doesn't keep bright ideas to themselves.

With the right guidance, salads and ice cream are amenable to whim and any level of resources. They’re reliable, and they’re fun to eat with friends. Gosh, salad can even be an all-in-one meal! And ice cream can become a sandwich, shake, bon bon—we'll stop.

That's why we wanted to write our newest cookbooks, Mighty Salads and Ice Cream & Friends (out April 11, but ready for pre-order now). There wasn't an ice cream book out there that didn't intimidate us home cooks, and there can be so much more to salads than greens + dressing + (maybe) other stuff.

(Above: Dispatches from our team offsite last summer: salad and ice cream—by coincidence!)

These all-fun, no-fuss guides will get you to better, brighter lunches, dinners, and dessert (you can decide if you're eating ice cream for dinner or dessert). They're curated by our enthusiasm for the subjects but they’re stuffed (we mean stuffed) with the smarts of our community and Genius food luminaries. Our longtime community member EmilyC is an environmental scientist by day and salad whisperer by night, who came up with 30 new salad recipes for the book. Cristina Sciarra went to ice cream school for fun, so obviously she dreamt up incredible new recipes for the ice cream book.

We've loaded up this page with all the essentials about the books, but we also wanted to make a highlight reel. Because there are so many highlights we can't wait to for you to see. Let us tease you, will you?

Mighty Salads

60 New Ways to Turn Salad into Dinner—and Make-Ahead Lunches, Too

• You will find salads: roasted, toasted, frittered, fried, slivered, shaved, marinated, wilted, charred, crisped, and more. We tried to make that rhyme.
• There's a chapter called "Meat Salads."
• Did you know you can pickle grains?
• Did you know you can make hard-boiled egg dressing? (Cobb salad won't ever be the same.)
• ...or Parmesan Vinaigrette?
• If you're more of a not-recipe person, each recipe comes with a formula so you can go forth with the ingredients you've got around.

Ice Cream and Friends

60 Recipes and Riffs for Sorbets, Sandwiches, No-Churn Ice Creams, and More

• There is burnt toast ice cream. You have to make it. No excuses.
• There is also: sorbet, sherbet, slushies, semifreddo, sandwiches, milkshakes, sundaes, splits, and shaved ice. Gelato, granita, frozen yogurt, frozen custard, cremolada, cake, and velvet, too. There’s ice milk, coolers, and floats, plus tacos, pies, pops, and paletas. There’s even something called spoom, which might be our favorite of all—and there are probably others we forgot.
• Beer ice cream is what mud pie always needed.
• Ice cream croutons is brilliant—that Genius tip is from Brooks Headley, and there are others throughout.
• Base curdled? Ice cream melted? No worries! We've got answers.

For a lot more details and to snag your copies, head right here. While both books come out April 11, if you order in The Food52 Shop now, the first 500 copies will be signed by Food52's co-founders Amanda and Merrill, and the others will be hand-stamped by the editors. Will you just look at these stamps made by Chief Doodler, Sarah Jampel:

Until we’re able to share the books with you, we want to see your mighty salads and ice cream (and its friends). Share them with the hashtag #f52bookclub and we’ll write about the smartest, most delicious.

Two cheers for lettuce and sprinkles!

But not together.