This week, we will explore homemade dressings. Today, the topic of Italian dressings. Please send in your comments on your Italian Dressings. In my opinion, the best way to make an Italian dressing is to simply explore flavor with taste. The two main ingredients:
Oil (preferablly extra virgin olive oil, next canola oil if needed)
Vinegar (balsamic and apple cidar work great!)
Aside of these, you will need seasonings and spices to fit your desired taste. Great starters are salt, pepper, sugar, garlic powder and onion powder. These alone will make an excellent flavor. You can also throw in garlic and onion raw, but you might want to consider mixing it in the blender in order to chop up all of the pieces.
Other great additions to this dressing are mustard powder, basil, a small amount of ketchup, lemon or lime juice…these are just examples. Play around with it! This will keep for a long time, but I would recommend only make enough to last no more than 1-2 weeks to maintain optimum freshness.
Today I’m going to discuss the topic of making your own salad dressing. The following are all reasons to make your own salad dressings:
Excellent Taste. Homemade salad dressings beat store-bought dressings any day of the week.
You can make them to fit your taste. You can not only get creative with different tastes but you can leave out nasty ingredients.
High Quality. If you use high quality raw ingredients, you know your end product will be high quality. By making your own dressings, you also do not have to add any type of preservative, which in itself makes your food higher quality.
Save Money. Making your own dressings saves money - no question about it.
Longer lasting. While store bought dressings have preservatives to make them have a relatively long shelf life - that preservative is not particularly healthy - like we mentioned. The raw ingredents needed to make your own dressings are usually very long lasting (in particular dressings such as Italian, which consists mainly of an oil, a vinegar, and herbs).
Buying the raw ingredients in bulk is a great way to build up food storage for not only salad dressings, but for other food too, and you can have fresh dressings any time or you can can them too!
Gardening has so many different important uses. The uses include, but are not limited to:
(1) Physical Exercise. Gardening is great exercise, therefore a benefit to your general well-being.
(2) Variety. By creating your own garden, you have the creativity to plant whatever you desire! You can very inexpensively plant food in larger quantities, and also plant variety to ensure a long harvest. From radishes for fresh salad, to squashes and potatoes, you will have a very long season of fresh food.
(3) Nutrition. By planting your own food, you can control the amount of chemicals, or lack there of, that end up on the food you eat. You can also eat organic foods for lower costs, which provide larger sources of vitamins than conventionally grown crops.
(4) Save Money. Raising your own food is financially less, but does require time. Since you can achieve so many different advantages of gardening at the same time as raising food, it is a very good deal!