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Dalai Mama Dishes

by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

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Best Buttermilk Dressing

Posted June 22, 2009
Find more about salad , ranch , dressing , dalai mama
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Everything looks glamorously old-fashioned in a mason jar! Even uber-modern ranch dressing!

Ben, snipping chives with scissors, after we recovered from seeing a SNAKE! A SNAKEI SNAKE! in the herb garden. It was about four inches long, and we screamed our heads off for ten minutes.

These are the ingredients. You don't need a boy with a fading pirate tattoo on his cheek, but it doesn't hurt.

For a pleasantly weird experience, read the ingredients on your Worcestershire sauce. What the?

A finger is fine for the initial tasting. . .

. . . but really, you should always taste dressing on a piece of the salad before you finish seasoning it. Does it need more salt? More vinegar? If it needs *less* of something, you're kind of screwed--try adding more of something else instead.

I don't need to tell you how fun it is to spin the salad! Also, white-washing the fence is always a total blast!

My "new" bowl from the Salvation Army. Oh, and salad!

Our last peony. And a bored-looking Birdy back there, eating salad.

When it comes to salad dressing, the world really splits into people who have worked food service jobs and people who haven't. So, for example, if you have ever scrubbed dishes in a restaurant kitchen or prepped for the dinner rush work or balanced a dozen salads on a tray in a crowded café, then a whiff of ranch dressing is like Proust's madeleines: it will instantly catapult you into that time in your life when salad dressing left greasy splotches across all your shoes and big-tips mini skirts, when salad dressing was all your fingernails knew of spa treatments, when salad dressing was a smell that could never be scrubbed from your hair or pores no matter how soapy the shower. And I don't mean that in a good way. I once served a table of French tourists one of whom held up a gloppy forkful of dressed salad and said, grimacing politely, "How do you call this?" I pictured their zippy little bistro vinaigrettes and said, "Ranch," and they nodded vigorously, as if they understood. Dude.

Which makes me surprised that I, as a person who almost always dresses salad with a zippy little vinaigrette (see bonus recipe below), would be attempting to recreate ranch dressing in my very own kitchen. Or, I should say, buttermilk dressing, since Ranch Dressing is actually a Hidden Valley trademark (Does that mean if I had a Western-themed wedding, and wanted you to wear, say, chaps, I couldn't specify "ranch dressing" on the invitation without getting sued by bleach-dressing giant Chlorox? We'll never know.) But I blame the kids. Because, you see, I want to say that the way towards salad loving is paved with high-quality fresh vegetables and delicious, flavorful greens--but I don't think that's exactly true. For both of my children, the way to salad-loving has actually been a slow boat on a river of unctuous, savory dressings. They both love salad now--but it has taken years and years, and buckets of different combinations of oil and vinegar and mayonnaises and seasoning. And this was true for me too: the first salad I loved was a wedge of iceberg lettuce with a big bloop of Russian dressing spilled over it. I would love it still, all that ketchupy mayonnaise.

So, this dressing--it's like an American right of passage, only I can't tell if homemade buttermilk dressing is the best or worst of both worlds. On the one hand, it seems silly to make it from scratch when there are so many packets and bottles out there. And yet, those packets and bottles a) remind me of restaurant work (not in a good way--see above), and b) usually contain MSG, which is the migraine-trigger equivalent of a Charlie Horse to the skull with a wine bottle. Plus, when you make it yourself, the freshness of the herbs and buttermilk really makes the whole thing sing. Even without the MSG, which is the addictive tingle that keeps your hand fishing around the Doritos bag while your mouth is crammed full and spraying Doritos crumbs every time you say, "Take these from me--someone take these from me." The splash of Worcestershire sauce is meant to replace a little of the umami--that ultra-savory addictiveness you get from MSG, anchovies, parmesan, fish sauce, miso--and I think it works well here. But, of course, you could skip it, just as you could skip the onion and garlic powder--and you'll end up with a dressing that is less familiar in its ranchyness, but also would be fresher-tasting and less baffling to French tourists. Either way, it's a great dressing, a great way to treat the salad greens that are so fresh and inspiring right now that they should be compelling your children to write odes to chlorophyll, but oh well. It's enough that they're eating a little lettuce with their ranch dressing.

Best Buttermilk Dressing
For a different kind of dressing, skip all the seasoning except salt and sugar, use lemon juice in place of vinegar, and add grated lemon zest and lots of fresh herbs: marjoram and lemon thyme, say, or tarragon. Or try the mayo-buttermilk base with garlic and lime zest and juice along with cilantro, and you will end up with the perfect dressing for a Mexican-style salad with black beans, corn, tortilla chips, and grilled chicken in it. Yum.

1 cup Hellman's or Best Foods mayonnaise, not low-fat
1/2 cup buttermilk
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon each finely chopped parsley, and freshly snipped chives, and dill (you could skip the parsley without any great loss of anything)
1 clove garlic, pressed through a garlic press
1/2 teaspoon each garlic and onion powder (optional, but very ranch-y tasting)
3/4 teaspoon kosher salt (or half as much table salt)
1/2 teaspoon sugar
Freshly ground black pepper to taste

Whisk together all the ingredients and serve as a dip or dressing. It keeps well for a few days or so, but after that it starts to taste like aging garlic: halve the recipe if you don't plan on using a ton of it right away.

Bonus recipe: Zippy Little Vinaigrette
Whisk together 2 tablespoons of vinegar (wine vinegar is basic and yummy, balsamic vinegar is sweet and yummy, and sherry vinegar is rich and nutty) with 4 tablespoons olive oil and 1/2 teaspoon each of kosher salt and Dijon mustard. Voila!

Get a printable version of this recipe.

Dish with Dalai Mama
Visit the Dish with Dalai Mama community group to chat about this recipe, upload photos of your cooking, connect with Catherine, and more! Go to Group

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Best Buttermilk Dressing

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About Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman is the author of the memoir, Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, available online and in bookstores nationwide.

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