Salads: Cow food and making your own blue cheese dressing
We all know that for the best nourishment our diet should contain a variety of things. We have favorites, some are extreme. I’ve seen people buy a pizza then pick through it like a buzzard trying to pick out a meal from an armadillo.
As a kid I always had a choice. I could eat what was prepared or wait for the next meal.
My Kansas father-in-law was a meat-and-potatoes guy and ate meat at every meal. There were certain things he would not eat. Chet had probably grown thousands of tons of soybeans. I asked him if he had ever eaten them. “That’s cow food,” he replied.
He raised turnips; planted them between rows of corn. Turnip greens? Nope, more cow food.
He wouldn’t eat raw veggies but they could get him to eat veggies in Jello. They had Jello all the time.
The KW will eat a salad if there is honeymustard dressing on it. Her third choice is ranch dressing but No. 2 is something unknown in the South.
Dorothy Lynch is a popular tomato-based, sweet dressing and condiment similar to French dressing but not exactly. It is made in Nebraska and you’ll find it on most Kansas restaurant tables.
We all have a favorite salad dressing and mine is chunky blue cheese dressing.
Bridgman’s Chophouse is a very upscale restaurant in Chattanooga’s Read House hotel. The first time I ate there I had their blue cheese dressing. I asked for another small bowl of it and drank it.
I’ve never tried making blue cheese dressing but October contains “Moldy Cheese Day” and that motivated me.
At the local German grocery store I found a package of blue cheese crumbles and set my cap for homemade blue cheese dressing
We don’t keep buttermilk around, the foundation of ranch and blue cheese dressings. There are always jars of plain homemade yogurt. I wondered if that would substitute for buttermilk. It did.
I now have three canning jars of freshly made blue cheese dressing and a head of lettuce.
The basics are buttermilk (or plain yogurt), blue cheese crumbles, mayonnaise, sour cream, milk, Worcestershire sauce, sugar. Recipes abound online.
The yogurt is made from non-fat dry milk. The KW would not use it because she said it was “thin and tasted like cardboard.”
What was missing, I decided, was the fat part. The KW wouldn’t use it until I started spiking it with a eighth of a cup of heavy cream, replacing the fat. One cup of milk powder to four cups of water plus the cream does it.
And, I didn’t know she’d ever eaten cardboard.