Adventures in Cooking - Salad Dressing

My boyfriend and I decided to try our hands at gardening. I don't rightly recall the reason - I think it just seemed like a good idea at the time.

I won't speak for Aric, but I am notoriously bad at plants. I try to take care of plants and they die. I leave plants alone and they die. It's frustrating, to say the least.

Aric found this really cool book called Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew. It is about the best thing ever. Basically what you do is build a 4' square box, then divide it up into square feet, and plant in each square foot. You get a lot of crops in a conveniently small space (it's also great because you don't have to lean way over to weed or harvest or anything).

We've got a nice variety of plants: tomatoes, a few kinds of peppers, cantaloupe, strawberries, basil, thyme, celery, and about three kinds of lettuce. The lettuce is growing like MAD, so we picked off some of the largest, outer-most leaves and had ourselves a salad.

In my last post I believe I said that I wanted to make a salad dressing for this particular salad, so that's what I did. I spent about half an hour looking for salad dressings that didn't start off with "1 cup mayo" or "1 cup sugar" - a dairy allergy is bad enough, but I don't need to hopped up on sugar to boot.

Thankfully, other cooks out there feel similarly, and I was able to find a variety of dairy-and-sugar-free salad dressings. (isn't that how it should be anyway?)

"SIMPLE SICILIAN" SALAD DRESSING

INGREDIENTS
3 tbsp. EVOO
2 tbsp. balsamic vinegar
1/2 tsp. dried oregano
Salt and pepper to taste

INSTRUCTIONS
1) Mix all ingredients in a small bowl; pour over salad.

WHAT I DID DIFFERENTLY
I think I added a little lemon juice. It just needed a little bit more of a zing to it (becaue somehow vinegar isn't "zing-y" enough for me).
I also think I would go a little easier on the oregano, or at least use fresh stuff. The dried flakes just looked kind of unappetizing floating on the top of the mixture. It didn't look bad on the salad, so I guess that's something.

THE BOTTOM LINE
Bottled salad dressing is SO last week.