Tuesday 3 June 2008

CC's Salad Dressing

This is a very simple dressing and you can make lots in advance and keep it in a bottle in the fridge to use to scatter over salads whenever you like. I made this up when I saw the price the supermarkets were charging for bottled salad dressings! It was outrageous and to make it worse, the bottled dressings had loads and loads of E numbers and one golden rule is that if you don't understand an ingredient, don't eat it!

Ingredients

1. Small bottle of Japanese mirin

From your pantry
  1. Olive oil
  2. Mustard
  3. Balsamico vinegar
  4. Garlic (small piece, around the size of the top joint of your little finger)
The secret to this simple tasty dressing is the mirin. If you can't get mirin, then use sweet sherry or sake. Even though sherry or sake can be a little sweet, you will need to stir in some sugar until it tastes a little *too* sweet, so around a flat tablespoon of sugar to 3 tablespoons of sherry or 2 tablespoons of sake.

Instructions

1. Chop up garlic finely or use electric chopper to whizz it until it's in little bits
2. In a bowl mix chopped garlic with a teaspoon of mustard, 5 tablespoons of mirin, 5 tablespoons of olive oil and 5 tablespoons of balsamico vinegar
3. Pour mixture into a little glass bottle and shake each time before use.
4. The salad dressing will last at least 3-4 weeks in a fridge and you can keep topping it up.

And that's it!

Example of use

Get a packet of ready-chopped salad from the supermarket, a packet of sausages and some pitta bread.

Fry the sausages. Then toast the pitta bread on frying pan or in a toaster. Open the pitta bread, stuff some salad inside, and scatter some of the salad dressing inside, add the sausage, shake on more salad dressing and that's a great snack!

If there are no sausages you fancy, then use bacon instead. Or fried tofu. Or chop up a chunk of cheddar and use that instead. Use your imagination!

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