Make Your Own Salad Dressing

The Center of the Home

Tonight I made my very first real salad dressing. I'd thrown oil and vinegar on a salad before, but that's not dressing. That's moisture. To me a dressing needs to be seen, and it needs to have plenty of flavor. It also needs to be able to be a marinade. Oil and vinegar alone aren't much of a marinade.

The Basic Vinaigrette Dressing from Julia's Kitchen Wisdom was the salad coverage this evening. It contains shallot, dijon-mustard, salt, lemon juice (fresh is always best, but you could cheat with bottled), wine vinegar (I went for a white wine vinegar, but I could have used rice wine vinegar, or maybe even red), olive oil, and fresh cracked pepper. The shallot, mustard, lemon juice, and vinegar are a 1:1 ratio. I doubled the recipe so I used 1 Tablespoon of all of those, with 1/2 tsp salt, and 2/3 cup of oil. Add the oil last and whisk very well as you slowly pour the oil in. Julia Child stated that you could shake it in a jar, or whisk it together. She suggested adding the ingredients one at a time, but if you're like me (a throw it all in the bowl and let's go kind of person) you just put everything but the oil and pepper in, then do your whisking. This will keep well in the fridge for almost a week, but the lemon juice and shallot will start to go funky eventually. My doubling serves 12-16.

I marinated a leftover roast chicken breast in this(see, a marinade) and then served it on top of romaine lettuce with some julienned onion (I just learned to julienne yesterday).

Oh, and we each had a salmon-mayo onigiri because the Nerd wanted some rice, and he said "How about an onigiri with it?" So, we had surf and turf.

I'm sorry, but I forgot a picture (I took a picture of my kitchen post clean up for you). It also wasn't the prettiest presentation considering I accidentally put too much dressing on each salad. We ate 6 servings each! Yikes!

But hey, olive oil is a "good" fat.