Not just another salad dressing! Jo’s Almond Butter Salad Dressing

If you pick up any salad dressing bottle in the store and read the ingredients, you’ll probably never want to pour that stuff over your salads again. Even the organic “good for you” kinds will have possible food colorings, canola and soy oils or even more harmful hydrogenated oils, xanthan gum, and juice concentrates.   That makes us wonder why more people don’t mix their own varieties of salad dressing instead of reaching for the bottle on the grocery shelf.  The answer is easy I guess, it’s all about convenience.  But what most people don’t realize is that we could eat so much tastier and healthier, and cut down tremendously in the trash that we generate, if we were to start with something as simple as salad dressing.  A typical bottle of salad dressing is 8 fl oz. How long does that last in a household of 2? I would guess less than a week.

These are the ingredients for an 8 oz bottle of Kraft’s (Tuscan House Italian) newest PureKRAFT line up. This is supposed to be one of their healthiest dressings. Hmmm… a whole paragraph of ingredients? Really? But why?

VEGETABLE OILS, (SOYBEAN OIL, CANOLA OIL AND EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL), WATER, VINEGAR, BALSAMIC VINEGAR(WATER, WINE VINEGAR, GRAPE JUICE), SUGAR, PARMESAN AND ROMANO MADE FROM COW’S MILK CHEESES (PART SKIM MILK, CHEESE CULTURE, SALT, ENZYMES) CONTAINS LESS THAN 2% OF SALT, DRIED GARLIC, GARLIC, DRIED ONIONS, EGG YOLKS, SPICE, LEMON JUICE CONCENTRATE, DRIED RED BELL PEPPERS, DRIED CARROTS, XANTHAN GUM, VITAMIN E, NATURAL FLAVOR
Size: 8 FL OZ

(Oh and by the way, made on equipment shared with wheat, milk, eggs, tree nuts, soy & fish, peanuts, and my grandmother’s kitchen sink! 🙂 ) What??  If you whip up some dressing at home, you know exactly where all ingredients came from, what equipment you’ve used, you can save a ton of money, help the environment and live healthier. It takes less than 5 minutes to make dressing that you can use all week.

Our dressings usually consist of finishing oils that you can find on our Eat for Life page, such as pumpkin seed oil, olive oil, walnut oil, etc., a pinch of sea salt, perhaps some lemon, maybe fresh pepper, and sometimes vinegar. But let’s face it the same old usual suspects of oil and vinegar tend to get boring. So for this reason I came up with a tangy creamy dressing that will compliment citrus, goat cheese, shrimp, chicken and really anything else that you’d like to experiment with.

In the picture below we drizzled it on a bed of locally grown heirloom greens with goat cheese and kumquats, finished with just a tiny drizzle of pumpkin seed oil. If you’re having this dish for lunch or dinner just by itself, make sure to add chicken or shrimp, for example, so to make sure that you get enough protein with your meal. We made this a few days ago as a side dish for skirt steak. It was such a great flavor combination. Please try some and let us know what you think.

Jo’s Almond Butter Salad Dressing

Ingredients 1 1/2 tablespoons Almond Butter Creamy w/Sea Salt 1 tablespoon Olive oil 1 tablespoon Coconut Water Vinegar (Apple Cider Vinegar works too) 3 tablespoons Water 2 pinch Sea Salt to taste 1 teaspoon Honey 1 pinch Black Pepper

Instructions
Gently mix all ingredients in small bowl with a spoon until all items are blended and no lumps are left.

We like to just drizzle our salads with dressing so this should be enough for 4 people. It yields about 1/2 cup of dressing.

We love this dressing on heirloom greens or mache salad with goat cheese and kumquats. Amazing!