I whipped up a batch of homemade salad dressing for the first time this afternoon. One of my best buds Jaime posted the recipe on her blog last week. She found it in Self magazine. It sounded delish and in my attempts at making more of our food from scratch and buying less processed foods, I decided to give it a try. (I'll also be giving the second recipe in her post a try, so look for that in the weeks to come.) I roasted the garlic while I was roasting my veggies for my veggie lasagna for Carson's birthday party. Then once the garlic had cooled awhile, I threw everything into the food processor and voila! Homemade salad dressing! I stuck it in the refrigerator for a bit until dinnertime when I could try it out on my salad of organic baby greens/carrots/cucumber/feta and conventional bell pepper. It was fabulous! A warning, though, you don't need a lot of it, as it's pretty strong. I put a little too much on my salad and had a slightly burning nose by the end of dinner. :) The bites with just a touch of dressing on it were great, though. Definitely a keeper and something I'll make on a regular basis! I used some organic balsamic vinegar that I picked up at Better Health, and organic garlic and honey. Roasted Garlic–Balsamic Vinaigrette
From the November 2008 Issue of Self
Makes 1/2 cup
1/2 head garlic
1/2 teaspoon honey mustard
1/2 teaspoon honey
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons extra light olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Heat oven to 400°. Slice 1 inch off top of garlic, exposing cloves; wrap in foil and roast until soft and fragrant, 40 to 45 minutes. Cool slightly. Squeeze cloves into a mini-chopper or food processor. Add remaining ingredients and 2 tbsp warm water; blend until smooth. Refrigerate up to 7 days.
The skinny: 43 calories per tbsp, 3.4 g fat (0.5 g saturated), 3.2 g carbs, 0.1 g fiber, 0.2 g protein
Spelt Pasta
I picked up some organic VitaSpelt whole grain spelt penne at Better Health last week. I've never tried spelt pasta, but had heard that it is good. So I decided to give it a try to further my attempt at working more whole grains into our diet by having it with some of my homemade meat sauce. And even better, VitaSpelt pasta is made right in Okemos, so its a local food, too! This was a very good pasta. We didn't really notice a different taste or texture or anything. It held up well during the cooking process, too. Definitely an easy way to work in more whole grains.
5 comments:
Spelt pasta sounds interesting. I may have to try that.
Nice work on the dressing. I may try to make some homemade salad dressing later this week. See if I have time :)
Ooh! What kind?? I found a couple other recipes in my files at home yesterday for homemade salad dressings that I want to try. Quite a few takes on the asian stuff - trying to find a similar one to the Sagano (and other japanese restaurants) salad dressing.
I also picked up some other fun pastas. A quinoa-kamut something one, and a whole wheat-parsley-garlic one. They had another one made with jerusalem artichokes that I almost bought, but figured I'd wait and try these three first. Plus, I'm hoping to make a trip down to Trader Joe's in the next month and I still like their pasta selection best.
We're having taco salads on Friday so I want to try some kind of french/catalina to go with them. If it turns out well I'll make it for my dad's party in case some people want to make salads.
You'll have to post the recipe if it does. Kevin doesn't care for balsamic vinaigrettes or the japanese salad dressings and asked me to make french (his fav.). I hadn't seen any recipes for it yet, though... haven't looked necessarily either.
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