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Whether you're on a diet, or you're looking for a go-to one bowl dinner recipe, salads should be thought of as crowd-pleasers, not a dreaded component of a meal.

What I love about the term 'salad' is that it can appear in so many different forms and says a lot about the cook. It could be a simple as fresh green lettuces tossed with a basic vinaigrette, or it could be as hearty as a couscous salad with grilled shrimp.

Take your average couscous salad, and it's almost always a sloppy mush, no matter how much attention has gone into getting flavours in there.

I'm pretty awesome at making salad dressings.

I make an enormous amount of salads, but my salads are like meals. They're amazing. I like going down to the farmers' market and looking to see whatever you can find, because you can put anything in a salad.

I take apart restaurant menus everywhere I go. I kind of tick off a lot of chefs in restaurants because I'll say, 'You can keep all of the sauce, keep all of that garbage - just give me that piece of fish. Forget the salad dressing, I don't need all of that extra stuff. Just give it to me straight up, and I'll eat it.'

There's not much cooking in our household. We do a lot of raw food, so it's more about putting the right ingredients together to create something scrumptious.

At work, we have fantastic catering people. They feed the cast and crew all day, and they're sensitive to the needs of picky vegetarians like me. They have delicious salads. I keep mine simple: romaine lettuce, avocado, baked tofu, carrots, tomatoes and Asian dressing.

Keep it simple in the kitchen. If you use quality ingredients, you don't need anything fancy to make food delicious: just a knife, a cutting board, and some good nonstick cookware, and you're set.