Salad Dressings

I haven't gone on a hoarding-related rant in a while.

I'm not all that into salads, but Papa Smurf is.  He thinks they're as good as eating your veggies.  Sometimes they are, but not when you buy those bags of chopped Iceberg with shreds of carrot and cabbage in them.  Mostly, bagged salads are a nutritional black hole.  Then, you go and put highly fattening dressings on them.  Store-bought dressings average 100 calories per tablespoon, and those calories are often all fat.

So, how do you improve on this standard of the appetizer world?  For starters, use a leafy green as your base.  Spinach, green-leaf lettuce, even Romaine is better than Iceberg.  That's just  cellulose-encased water.  Next, garnish with something beneficial like grape tomatoes, beets, or even green beans.  And once you've composed the salad, make your own dressing.

My favorite dressing is balsamic vinegar.  Not vinaigrette, just the vinegar.  Lots of flavor, no fat.  Lemon or tangerine juice with a small amount of olive oil, salt, and pepper comes in a close second.  For creamy dressings, you can use nonfat sour cream, nonfat yogurt, or soy-based mayo to create ranch or bleu cheese.

I guess what I'm trying to explain is that a salad is its ingredients, not whatever you put on top to mask their flavor.  A dressing should be just that, a subtle flavoring to enhance the ingredients and bring them to a logical conclusion.  There is no reason an entire shelf of a fridge should be taken up by an array of store-bought dressings.  Besides, dressings do have expiration dates on them.  You shouldn't keep them indefinitely, especially because all that fat will make them go rancid, even in the fridge.