Halibut salad

God, I love making my own salad dressing at home, freed from the tyranny and limitations of commercial bottled dressings. 

Who do those people think they are anyway? Hornswoggling entire generations of unsuspecting consumers into thinking that they and they alone are the only way to go. Ask yourself, "What did people do for salad dressing?" ... before the industrialists with their ranks of marketeers came along with their fancy emulsified concoctions of suspended ingredients and their convincing promotional campaigns and all of their many arrays of expensive colorful products of convenience, so often woefully wrongly misleadingly named?"  French dressing? The French claim no such thing as that awful goop. 

Oil + vinegar, the simplest dressing of all

Oil + vinegar +prepared mustard, the most simple emulsified vinaigrette

Oil + vinegar + prepared mustard + diced shallot, + salt and pepper, ordinary vinaigrette

Oil + vinegar + prepared mustard +honey, + salt and pepper, simple honey-mustard dressing 

The oil can be any type at all, vegetable, olive, any type of nut oil, even bacon fat. 

The vinegar can be any type of liquid acid, my favorite is rice vinegar, apple cider vinegar, wine, Champaign, balsamic, citrus acid, even grapefruit juice. 

Besides honey, any sweetener at all will expand the profile beautifully. Commercial products use HFCS, but you can use any jam or preserve, Golden syrup, maple syrup, refined sugar, sweet juices.

Any finely diced allium will impart its unique bite, any herb at all will breathe its unique breath. 

So there you have it. Go forth now and claim dominion over your own salad dressing destiny and break the surly bonds of bottled dressings.  

* The crowd roars with exuberant applause * in my head. 

The halibut was prepared a few days ago here for masa empanadas and it is still very good. It's almost gone now. There is only about 3/4 cup left. But the halibut would be great without all that treatment intended for empanadas. Just simply blanching a  a halibut steak or a fillet in any blanching liquid or flavored water, or unflavored water for that matter, under the boiling temperature, even so low as 150℉ / 65℃. The fish will be cooked through at internal temperature of 140℉ / 60℃.  That is where it will be at its most tender. Other fish types you will want to cook even less because they dry out when completely cooked all the way through. This halibut was seared in a pan with vegetable ingredients and flavored oil. After the spices and onion and garlic heated through, I cut the heat down to low and I stood there and watched the chunks of halibut change from translucent to white-opaque then removed the whole thing from the heat immediately. The leftover portions are reheated in a microwave from cold to warm for less than one minutes. The fish chunks are still light and tender. I have really been enjoying this single halibut steak in various forms and over a period of days.