Work for me Wednesday – Homemade Salad Dressing

I love to make my own things and as an avid cook something I’ve thought about making myself lately is homemade salad dressing. I’m talking about the kind of salad dressing you buy in the supermarket, not the vinegar,salt, oil kinda thing you hastily put together before dinner. There were three reasons why I wanted to do this:
1. Definitely more economic
2. No strange and unknown additional ingredients – all natural and definitely more healthy.
3. I was pretty tired of the same old vinegar/oil/salt dressing. It is simple and lovely but sometimes you just want something new. lol

Well this morning I had some extra time to prepare food and I got this “now or never” moment that one gets once in a while so I started.

I can’t give you exact instructions for how I did it, sorry. But don’t worry about that! Becasue it actually makes it even better, then you can make sure you add what you like and not what I like.

TIP: I took a look at the old salad dressing bottle I had and checked what ingredients they used. it’s good to know that whenever you read ingredients on anything it is listed in the order of what it contains most. Meaning: the first ingredients on my salad dressing bottles was: water. So it contains more water than anything. However when I made my dressing that didn’t really do the trick for me so I used more oil than water.
Start out small, use only a little bit of everything so you can get tot eh taste you want and gradually add oil, water and vinegar. Perhaps you need to add a bit more salt. If you find that it is too acidy then try adding a few teaspoons sugar. (Check your salad bottle and you will see that sugar is included) That happened to me and when I added a few tsp of sugar it became much better.

To make your own homemade healthy salad dressing you need:

Oil (I used normal cooking oil)
Vinegar – red and white or just one of them
Water

Dried spices
Garlic paste

Extra tip for garlic lovers: Put 2-3 garlic “heads” (peel first!) in a blender with some oil and mix until smooth. Transfer over into a small recipient and add salt. Now you have a ready to use garlic paste!You can add dried herbs to this as well if you want to and store in an airtight container. Here in Brazil we use that all the time when we cook rice – I’ll tell you about that another day.

Of course if you don’t want to make lots of garlic paste then just add a few pressed garlic cloves.

Ok Linda, how do I make this dressing? (get to the point girl!)
I’m sorry, let me give you the full recipe;

Oil
Vinegar
Water
Dried spices and herbs
Garlic paste

(dried cheese for cheese dressing)

In a blender mix a little bit of oil, water and vinegar. Most oil, less water and even less vinegar. Add spices or herbs you like. I used ready dried spices with an Italian touch for one.

Keep mixing until you get the proportions right and it is delicious.

Cheese dressing:
I made two dressings, one with only herbs and another one with dried grated Parmesan cheese. It’s the same thing as before only that you add cheese to get that wonderful cheesy taste.

Storage: I took use of the bought salad dressing plastic bottles that I had saved from before, otherwise you can probably just use a plastic jar with lid.

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