Make Your Own Salad Dressing!

All sorts of flavors come into raw food preparation, just as they do with traditional food preparation.  Really, when food is not broken down by cooking, it is sometimes easier to appreciate various mixes of flavors, which have a way of maintaining the distinctness of individual ingredients, even as they blend to remarkably enhance the taste of greens and vegetables on your salad plate.

By developing a repertoire of great-tasting dressings to enhance salads, in particular, but other foods as well, you are also enhancing your chances of making a permanent lifestyle change.  Most of the bottled and packaged salad dressings in the grocery store will contribute nothing to your health.  Rather, most of them have been heat treated and pasteurized, thus rendering them void of vitamins, enzymes, and many of their minerals, and many, (read the labels!), have had many preservatives, (with long non-pronounceable chemical names) added.

The good news is that there are hundreds of easy-to-assemble homemade
dressing recipes that can take you way beyond the simple

Experiment!

(and delicious) oil and vinegar or lemon juice combinations.  Most of them can be nicely put together in a blender or Nutri-Bullet (my favorite salad dressing machine) in just a few minutes. 
Be willing to experiment.  Go beyond that safe splash of olive oil, squeeze of lemon and favorite herb.  Try lots of recipes , (and you know that they are all over the web, starting with Pinterest), and in no time you’ll be inventing a whole new generation of dressings. A plateful of sprouts and greens becomes something else entirely when covered with a creamy avocado dressing or  an exotic Asian dressing, or a simple “goddess” concoction.  Once you’ve found a few dressings that you like, have two or three always made up and ready in your refrigerator.

Here are a few that I like – simple to make, tasty, and diverse. 

Beautiful and Nutritious

Avocado-Dill Dressing – from The Raw Gourmet,
 by Nomi Shannon
 

1 cup celery or cucumber juice, or water

1 cucumber peeled and chopped

1 small clove garlic, chopped

2 scallions, chopped,

1 red pepper, chopped

1 Tbs chopped fresh dill

1 avocado, cut in chunks

2 Tbs lemon juice

½ tsp liquid aminos or pinch sea salt

Honey or maple syrup

Honey or agave syrup (optional)

Blend everything but the sweetener in a blender, then sweeten to taste, if necessary.
 

French Dressing – (un, deux, trios, voila!) – from Rawsome, by Brigitte Mars

Yield: 2 cups

Fresh and Colorful

3 dates, soaked for 20 minutes

1 ½ cups extra-virgin olive oil

2/3 cup lemon juice

½ cup lemon juice

½ tsp tsp celery seeds

½ tsp paprika

1tsp chopped fresh basil

1 tsp Celtic salt


Marika’s “Goddess in the Raw” Dressing

from Living on Live Food, by Alissa Cohen

 

(If you like garlic, you’ll love this!)

Green and Creamy

2-3 limes, juiced

¾ cup raw apple cider  vinegar

1 bunch scallions (or green onions)

½ bunch parsley

4 cloves garlic

1 Tbs. olive oil

Blend all ingredients thoroughly.

 

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Making your own salad dressings is a good step toward healthier, more tasteful eating.  Try it!

For more recipes of all sorts, consult my website—www.janesmith-healthcoaching.com.  You can also subscribe to my monthly newsletter there, which always contains fun new, usually seasonal,  raw recipes.