Okay, the computerised crime re-enactments on Bones are just getting weird.

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QOTD

"Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects." - Mark Twain, A Horse's Tale, summarising the editorial philosophy of Herodotus.

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Salad dressing that doesn't suck.

I hate salad dressing. It's always been a vinegar-or-mayonnaise-based way of ruining a perfectly good salad by making it taste like vinegar, or mayonnaise.

But without dressing, you have to be REALLY careful about your ingredients or else it's bland. In the past, I've added onions and apples (no, really. Apples. Try it) to salad, and sprinkled it with various spices, and even found that House Of Tsang Bangkok Padang Peanut Sauce (from the makers of SPAM - again, no, really) makes an excellent dip/dressing.

Anyway. The classic "just squeeze some lemon on your salad" advice, while good, combined with my father's traditional salad dressing recipe[1] and led to EXPERIMENTATION.

And it turned out good.

So, here it is, Salad Dressing That Doesn't Suck.

We usually make it right into this little 116ml tupperware-ish container. In two creations so far, it's totalled about the 90ml mark each time and turned out good.

The mix is:
Light olive oil, about 35ml. ish.
Lemon juice, about 30ml, ish. Less than the oil, but similar.
Lime juice, "a nice big squirt", probably 10ml-ish. Makes up the difference between the lemon and the oil.
3 cloves garlic, smashed up real good in a Garlic Smasher(tm).
Garlic salt (it's like salt, but with powdered garlic in!) ~1/4 tsp
Black pepper, ~1/4 tsp.
"a whole package of the seasoning mix from a Loblaws 'garlic and herb seasoning' pack that comes in their pre-prepped salad mix." - about 1/2 -> 3/4 tbsp. Ingredients say it's mostly black pepper, cumin, and oregano, with a little dried garlic, dried onions, and nasty preservatives we just won't mention. Yes, this is the third source of garlic in this dressing STOP JUDGING ME. If you lack the seasoning packs because the prepped-with-seasoning-pack salad is not on stupidly good sale near you, you should be able to duplicate this with, well, about 3/4 tbsp of mixed pepper, cumin, and oregano, and maybe a bit of dried onion or extra garlic powder. If you've got actual onions in the salad, don't worry about the extra onions.

Shake real good, let sit for at least 20 minutes. Shake real good again because after 20 minutes the oil and citrus will have partially separated, pour some into container full of salad, shake real good a third time. Eat. Refrigerate your leftovers - it will separate and chunk up, but stir it well and nuke it in the microwave for ~10s and it will go right back to being all-liquid goodness.

The salad was, originally, "Loblaws Harvest Salad Mix - the same stuff you steal the spice packet from" with some added celery and cucumber - romaine, shredded carrots, red cabbage slivers, radicchio, and then we added celery and cucumber. Today, it's shredded romaine, shredded carrots, a little sweet onion, and cucumber, tossed.

CHEFFERY.


[1]: For perhaps the only time ever for me, the phrase "my father's traditional recipe" here doesn't mean "takeout".

A slice of life.

On cleaning The Backe Yarde:

torrain: "Do you care which bag I use?"
Me: "It's dog poop, in plastic. Whichever way you want to do it is fine - it's not rocket science."
[pause]
Me: "If it suddenly becomes rocket science, then I want to know what we've been feeding her."