A guy I dated briefly once told me—as he sat at my kitchen table and watched me cook dinner—that the French have a saying: “She’s so lazy, she buys her vinaigrette.” I think he made it up. Google can’t find it. Not surprisingly, the relationship didn’t work out…
However, he had a point. Store-bought salad dressing must be one of the easiest things to replace with homemade. You reduce not only your waste by cutting out all those (often plastic) bottles of dressing but also the crud that goes into the dressing, such as canola oil, sugar, substances chemists concocted in a laboratory…
My picky eater never turns her nose up at a salad I have tossed with homemade balsamic vinaigrette. And she doesn’t seem to care what kind of vegetables I add to the greens. She simply gobbles everything up.
Balsamic Vinaigrette
Ingredients
- 1 cup olive oil
- 1/2 cup balsamic vinegar
- 4 cloves minced garlic
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
I can buy olive oil and balsamic vinegar in bulk but I also often buy them in glass bottles, which I reuse for kombucha and ginger beer. I bought the salt and peppercorns in bulk using my own jars, so no waste there.
Directions
1. Whisk together ingredients in a measuring cup or bowl. Transfer to a glass bottle.
2. Store in the refrigerator. We eat this within a couple of weeks.
If you have loads of lemons as we do at the moment, you can swap the balsamic vinegar for lemon juice. Charlotte likes red wine vinegar too. Half balsamic and half red wine vinegar also tastes delicious.
Honestly though, I’m not lazy! I kept this post short but this week I also compiled an alphabetical list of all of my blog posts on the new page “Blog Index.” If you want to look up an old post, you can easily find it there.
Haha you’re right, this is not a french saying : ready-made vinaigrette is not common in shops here. Vinaigrette is the first thing a french child learns to make in a kitchen, the base we use is : oil – vinegar – mustard. No measurements, the kid learns to gauge by taste. Then we add ingredients according to whatever we have in the cupboard. That’s how my dad tought me how to cut a square pattern through the onion before dicing it in little cubes, without crying. As a 9 year-old, I added my own twist : a touch of honey.
Thank you for clearing that up. It makes so much sense that you would have trouble finding bottled vinaigrette in France! Thanks for sharing the memory also 🙂
When I lived in France, I saw the French applying equal amounts of olive oil and balsamic vinegar to their salads, through various techniques. Back home, I didn’t think much of salads until my aunt from Canada visited and made a large bowl of fresh salad with every meal. Since then, yup, I’ve been making a close version of your recipe above and usually have a small amount in my fridge.
I love mixing up the vinegars I use in my vinaigrettes – one of the side effects of my pickling habit is that I have a full selection of various vinegars (red wine, balsamic, cider, rice wine, white) on hand at all times. I’ve also started using jams in my dressings from time to time, which are particularly good with spinach and kale.
Your kitchen sounds awesome Becky 🙂 What a great idea to add some of your jam to vinaigrette. I’m going to try that. My daughter will probably eat more kale salad if I do that.
Lazy is not a word I would ever have dreamed of applying to you somehow ! But sometimes lazy is good too, sometimes lazy is indeed the mother of invention and sometimes I feel that the preparing/fermenting is a gift to me in the future me so that I may be lazy when I need to be… so a few minutes of making a bottle of salad dressing today and lazy for a week, nice.