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.