Food

Who likes salad?

Me, okay? Me. I like salad. Who knew?

I’ll share the story below, but for those of you who go straight to the recipe, here’s my version of a basic vinaigrette that you can tweak to your heart’s desire, and make all your own. Be sure to share what you do to it so that I can try, too!

Print Recipe

Super Simple Basic Vinaigrette

My tweaked FoodNetwork.com Recipe
Prep Time5 minutes
Total Time5 minutes
Course: Salad
Keyword: Dressing, Salad, Simple, Vinaigrette
Servings: 10 30-ml servings

Equipment

  • Small Bowl
  • Whisk
  • Air-tight container

Ingredients

  • ¾ c Extra Virgin Olive Oil
  • ¼ c apple cider vinegar
  • 3 tsp Dijon mustard
  • 1 tsp minced garlic
  • ½ tsp Kosher salt
  • ½ tsp ground black pepper

Instructions

Option 1 – Whisk it

  • Combine the apple cider vinegar, mustard, garlic, salt and pepper in a bowl, and whisk until smooth.
  • While continuously whisking, drizzle olive oil until well mixed and emulsified.
  • Serve immediately, then pour remaining dressing into air tight container and refrigerate.

Option 2 – Shake it

  • Combine all ingredients in an airtight container. Close, then shake for at least 30 seconds.
  • Serve, then refrigerate remaining dressing.

Notes

The flavors really meld over time, so it will get increasingly better days later.  
Also, if your refrigerator tends to run a bit cold, the dressing may solidify.  If your airtight container allows for it, you can zap it in the microwave for about 10 seconds to start, then in 5 second bursts if necessary.  If your container has metal, you could try running warm water over it to loosen it up.  

I didn’t always like salad. It’s not the first thing that I would order in a restaurant. Maybe not even the third thing. Restaurants put weird things in salad. Grapes. Avocados. Orange slices.

I grew up thinking that salad should be “normal.” Iceberg lettuce, some carrots, maybe some cucumbers, and tomatoes. Some in our household went for blue cheese dressing. (Maybe it’s spelled bleu cheese – I don’t really care, as I don’t go for moldy cheese.) Most went for Ranch dressing. And that’s where my obsession started.

Did you know that Ranch goes with everything? Salad, of course. Raw veggies – duh. But then you add in chicken in almost all shapes and forms (nuggets, fried tenders, quesadillas), and the sky’s the limit!

It’s not that healthy of an addiction.

Recently during a work trip, I got courageous at a restaurant – maybe it was because I didn’t really see anything else on the menu that I was interested in – and ordered… *gasp* a salad! It was definitely a weird salad, too. Spring greens, toasted pecans, red grapes, bacon, blue cheese, croutons, chicken breast, and a vinaigrette. Of course, OF COURSE I asked to modify it. No blue cheese, please, and Ranch dressing on the side.

It was only okay – and you can bet that I didn’t add any of the Ranch to the grapes. That would be lunacy.

But there was something about that combination. Nuts, greens, grapes and bacon. I could recreate that at home pretty easily, right? And not only that, why not try to make a vinaigrette? I’d been trying new things lately. And I found a recipe super easily. It’s incredibly basic, and a cinch to make – though I swapped out the type of vinegar to apple cider…

So with all my tweaking, my new go-to salad is now this:

  • spinach and arugula mix
  • baked chicken, cubed
  • chopped carrots
  • quartered red grapes
  • raw pecans
  • vinaigrette

I’m not sure what happened, but I flat out love this salad. I may tweak it more as time goes by, but for now, it’s hitting the mark each day I have it. Yum!

What’s your go-to healthy meal?

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