Playing Dress-up with Lettuce

At this very moment, I have an enormous bag of lettuce in the refrigerator. One of those plastic grocery store bags stuffed totally full with washed and spun-dry lettuce from the garden. This is the time of year when we eat salad almost every night. Although, "salad" sounds kind of fancy for what it actually is that I usually end up putting on the table, which is more often than not just the lettuce. I don't even add any other vegetables to it this time of year. Lazy. I've even gotten awfully lazy with my salad dressing.

I used to make salad dressing by putting olive oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, and a little sugar in a screw-top jar, then shaking it violently until it was emulsified. If I was feeling fancy, I'd add a little Dijon mustard. But lately, I've just been shaking the oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper right over the lettuce and mixing. It's fine this way, but can get a little boring when you eat lettuce as much as we do this time of year.

Which is why I was so psyched to see this post. Ann used to comment here a lot, but she seems to have disappeared from the Internet. Before she did, though, I saw the post she did about making ranch dressing. I love ranch dressing, and used to buy it sometimes. It was a nice break from the vinaigrettes that are standard at our house.

Like Ann, I always considered making ranch dressing, but was put off by any chopping of onions or whatnot. I mean, I can't even be bothered to grate a carrot into my salads these days, you think I'm going to a lot of effort for the dressing? No.

But I tried Ann's method, which involves mixing mayonnaise and buttermilk (or yogurt) into a consistency you like, then adding dry dill, onion powder, garlic powder, salt, and pepper until it tastes good. And you know what? It TOTALLY tastes like ranch dressing. I don't know why I was so surprised, but I was. And I've made it a lot this lettuce season already.

Some people might get all chuffy about the herbs being powders instead of fresh or the mayonnaise being store-bought. Those people are welcome to chop and mix and make "real" ranch dressing. I'm going to stick to this easy, maybe-somewhat-cheating method that's still a hell of a lot better than Hidden Valley.

Oh, and also? This ranch dressing is dangerous if you have tortilla chips around. Dip them in the dressing and you have a way better version of Cool Ranch Doritos. You've been warned.