Salad dressing

Salad dressing:

Imagine you're going to blend vinegar with oil for the simplest of all dressings. In an oversized bowl, drizzle in as much of any type of vinegar your heart desires in the amount you imagine to suffice for the total amount of lettuce, that is, visualize a pile of lettuce in the bowl. If there are four people, imagine four small piles and sprinkle vinegar on your imaginary piles. Anticipate doing the same thing with oil, except first, add whatever other flavor enhancements you think of at that moment, say, something sweet, like honey. Add honey or preserves, or even sugar. Ginger and garlic are good additives too. Mustard is excellent because it's already emulsified so behaves as an emulsifier for the entire batch. Salt and pepper. Think creatively, smash an anchovy to substitute for salt, or use fish sauce to do the same thing, even soy sauce. Then add oil in the manner you added the vinegar. You have the entire world of oils at your calling, just waiting for you to use. Consider walnut oil, peanut oil, sesame oil, olive oil, and many others. Mix them if you wish. A few drops of sesame oil with canola oil for the remainder is an excellent combination. If olive oil is too strong to suit you, dilute it with vegetable oil. Drizzle the oil while whipping, taking care not to add more than you imagine on your own salad or the total amount for all your guests. This takes some intuition. People generally have a tendency to over do it. Which says to me, they have wild imaginations! If you add too much oil, of course your dressing will taste unpleasantly unctuous. This can be corrected by spilling some out and adding an acid, more vinegar, lime, lemon, grapefruit juice, pretty much anything acidic. Correct similarly if you initially added too much vinegar. It's fine to taste before adding the vegetables. In fact, let a guest taste. Just have them stick their finger in there and swipe some, then taste it on their finger. Observe their smile of approval, or their grimace of something having gone wrong.

You imagined lettuce, but of course you're adding a lot more than that, unless you're making a Caesar salad. That was just to help you with the amount of vinegar and oil to add into an oversized gaping empty bowl. Add all the other salad ingredients and toss. If you use your hands you'll be able to feel everything being coated. Don't soak the ingredients. That's awful. If there's a puddle of dressing remaining, then drain it. If there's too much coating the vegetables, then daub it with a paper towel and remove a portion. Maybe reserve a few individual ingredients to put on top. Sometimes, it's useful to season some ingredients individually then add them separately from the rest, like avocado. Don't give people a choice of salad dressings. Instead, have them accept whatever it is you make, or better yet, have one of your guests help you make it and allow them to help in deciding what goes into it. That way, they're invested in success, and you'll always have something different each time because you'll never be able to replicate what you did precisely because you weren't measuring, and you won't have any of those God awful prepared commercial dressing bottles rattling around in your refrigerator door. Com'on, be a sport. Give it a go.

Oh yeah, those are re-heated venison meatballs up there ^^^ put on top of bruschetta topping. See what I did there? Put the topping for something else on the bottom. How's that for being an iconoclastic food preparer, eh? Shredded cheese, the name of which I forgot, but it's some kind of imported sheep's cheese, and it's fantastic. The broccoli was added to the salad because it went cold by the time I got around to it. The Merlot was warm so I put ice cubes in the glass which promptly melted.

Do you know in ancient Rome it was scandalous to not mix your wine with water? You were considered an incorrigible undisciplined hopelessly heavy drinker if you failed to add water. People would whisper, "... and do you know he doesn't even mix water with his wine?" Then the person being told that would roll their eyes and tut.