Salad Dressing - Rule of thumb

My basic rule for salad dressing is one I learned from my friend Jen. She learned from her mom. Fat to acid is 3:1 ratio. The corollary is, use good olive oil because you will taste it.

Mostly I eyeball dressings, even the 3:1 part, but I have a couple of recipes that I will find and post.

Z is actually taking a nap. It's weird, so I will use the time here since J is skiing and the laundry is caught up.

The standby at our house is balsamic vinegar and olive oil mixed 1:3. That's it.

This one is the Macedonian Salad from The New Moosewood Cookbook: 4T olive oil, 2 T red wine vinegar, 1 mashed up garlic clove, 1/2 t salt (I usually leave this out), 1/2 t basil, 1/4 t thyme, 1/4 t oregano, 1 T fresh lemon juice, freshly ground black pepper. In the book the dressing is tossed with roasted eggplant cubes and a bunch of chopped veggies. I find that the dressing makes a really nice Greek-type dressing. That's why I don't add the salt, my salad usually has olives and feta that are plenty salty.

The cilantro-lime salad dressing at Cafe Rio is really good, and you can make it at home! In this case the acid is straight lime juice mixed in the 1:3 ratio with olive oil. Clean a bunch of cilantro, I'd say a handful. It's ok to use some stems, so if you are feeling like a shortcut just cut off the top of a bunch. Rough chop it and mix into dressing OR here's a time to use an appliance. Put all 3 ingredients into your blender and blend it up. I use a stick blender - juice the limes into a liquid measuring cup, then you can easily see how much oil to add, add the cilantro and then blend in the cup. If you aren't serving a formal dinner then the dressing can go right to table in the measuring cup - just watch for drips!

I like to make a dijon mustard dressing, too. 1 T dijon mustard and chopped garlic clove added to a basic red wine vinegar and olive oil mix. This is excellent on a salad nicoise - bed of greens with tuna, straight from the can, hard boiled egg slices, blanched and chilled green beans (or leftover roasted green beans - we had some leftover once), cold boiled potatoes, a few capers, sliced or chunked tomato if they are in season and olives. As the name implies, a true salad nicoise would use nicoise olives (the gross black ones in oil). We don't like them, so I use kalamata. I learned this one from Jacques Pepin. He's French.

I tend to buy my kalamata olives in a big jar at Costco. They also have big jars of sun dried tomatoes which I buy. It's nice to dress up a salad when it isn't summer and there aren't any fresh tomatoes worth eating. When you get to the end of the jar of sun dried tomatoes, there is some olive oil left that has basically been infused with the yummy tomato flavor. Try using this instead of regular olive oil as a base for homemade greek pizza or to brush on bread to make a bruschetta. You can also mix the oil with some vinegar (use a mild vinegar) to make a dressing that seems much fancier than it is. Or blend the tomato oil with basil to make an especially interesting pesto - you can freeze it for later in a zip top freezer bag.

If you are drowning in basil or have leftover pesto, you could do a basil dressing by basically thinning out pesto with more olive oil. This isn't so good for salad greens since there isn't any acid to balance out the bitter of the greens, but it is good for a potato salad or to toss with roasted vegetables like zukes and eggplant.