Food, Photography and Bon Mots
Like that proverbial little black dress, it’s important to have a collection of delicious salad dressings at the ready. You never know. This Chipotle Honey Vinaigrette is a great candidate for your salad dressing repertoire. It’s mildly spicy, mildly sweet and mildly tangy. In other…
If you are into creamy “ranchy” salad dressings, this is a spectacular dressing. I first fell in love with this type of dressing as a teenager. My family used to buy pizza from a Belmont Shore (CA) restaurant called Domenico’s. For them, it was all…
Guilty food pleasures.
Mine are Ranch Dressing, Cheetos and refried beans.
Yours?
And about that Ranch Dressing…
The recipe here is a homemade version of the iconic dressing introduced in 1950 by Steve Henson under the name Hidden Valley Ranch. Henson was a former construction worker and cook in Alaska. Faced with a dearth of perishable ingredients to work with, Henson fiddled around with dried ingredients until he came up with an early version of what would come to be known as Ranch Dressing. By the mid 1950s, Henson and his wife had relocated to Santa Barbara, California, where they opened up The Hidden Valley Inn. The rest is history. Their dressing exploded in popularity with people reportedly visiting the inn with empty glass jars to fill with the dressing and take home. To meet the demand (and to build their business), the Hensons quickly decided to package the dry ingredients for sale. Henson sold Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing to Chlorox in 1972. Ranch Dressing’s really big breakthrough came in 1986 when Doritos began selling Cool Ranch Doritos. What started as a local dish became an international rock star and an multi-million dollar business.
Over the years, Ranch Dressing has become the most popular salad dressing in America according to The Association of Dressings and Sauces. (Yes. There is such an organization. In fact, they’ve been around since 1926.) According to a survey they conducted in 2017, forty percent of Americans identify Ranch as their favorite dressing. Clever people that we are, Ranch has become much more than a salad dressing. You can find it on pizzas, as a sauce for chips and fries, and on and on. A restaurant in St. Louis, Twisted Ranch, features a Ranch-infused vodka. (Whoa on that one!)
Here is a spicy tribute to Henson: Jalapeno-Ranch Dressing.
This recipe is adapted from an Alexa Weibel recipe from the New York Times. You can find the original recipe here.
A couple of swells… Are you trying to place that expression? It’s from the classic 1948 MGM musical Easter Parade. It was the highest grossing MGM movie in the 1940s–a real crowd please, apparently. Here is the link: Astaire and Garland: A Couple of Swells. Aah.…
This is a very good vinaigrette. Glorious, in fact. The hot new chef, Samin Nosrat, featured this salad dressing recipe in a recent New York Times Magazine food piece titled “Best Green Salad in the World.” That kind of high praise made me think this…
At dinnertime, my mother always placed a bottle of salad dressing on our kitchen table next to a bowl of pale iceberg lettuce pieces. Always Wish Bone. Always Italian.
I’m an unrepentant foodie. I love food. Cooking is a delight for me. I love phographing food. I love reading (and writing) about food. I love exploring international markets in search of new foods and new recipes. Travel, for me, was always as much about food as it was about anything else.
I didn’t grow up that way.
My mother, who grew up on a rural farm in the American South, did a lot of things very well, but she had a lot on her plate and had very little time (or money) for food and cooking. She did bake exceptional holiday pies, but our everyday fare was pretty plain–white bread, Campbell’s soups (tomato and mushroom), Wish Bone salads, and a mystery meal she called “goulash.”
When I grew up and started exploring the world of food, I was amazed by what was out there. (Brie! Who knew????) Homemade minestrone. (No way!) Artisanal breads.( You’ve got to be kidding me.) Salads that combined textures and interesting ingredients and that were dressed with homemade dressings. (Wow! Wow! Wow!)
Here is a recipe for a wonderful salad and homemade salad dressing. The dressing is a garlicky Caesar-wannabe. I clipped it out of Gourmet Magazine back in July of 1981. The recipe appeared in a column in Gourmet that printed reader recipes. In this case, it was Trudy Hamm Reid and she was submitting her husband’s recipe under the title Neil’s Romine Salad with Garlic Vinaigrette. Trudy was pretty proud of Neil’s recipe, saying that he made “the most fantastic salad.” I agree. Way to go, Neil!
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https://bluecayenne.com/neils-romaine-salad-with-vinaigrette-garlicky-tangy-and-homemade
