I don't know why Blondie, my wife, makes such good salads. I've tried to learn from her, but my salads neither look as good as she makes them, nor are they as tasty.

That's not to say my salads aren't edible. In fact, they're fairly good. It's just that Blondie's salads seem to be "magically delicious", (and no, they don't include breakfast cereal in them.) My late first wife, Em, was a master at most cookery, and an absolute genius at soup. I've learned to make very good soup, almost as good as Em did, but not quite. I, on the other hand, am better at baking bread than either one of them, and while I've tried to pass along that artistry to each of them, it hasn't worked.

Never the less, I've learned to make great Italian dressing, and between my dressing and her salads, we're eating mighty fine meals these days, with homemade soup, homemade bread, and great salads with homemade dressing these days. I'd like to share with you a recipe you can use to great advantage right now, in making a great Christmas gift for your friends and relatives.

3 Packets, 4 Dollars

It seems like everybody owns a Good Seasons salad cruet. They have lines on the side that measure vinegar, water, and oil, for preparing dressing from their mixes. Most people think Good Seasons Italian dressing is great - but it costs more for the mix alone than bottled dressings, and you have to pay for the vinegar and oil on top of that, and wash the cruet as well.

As a skinflint, you'd think I would object most to the price of Good Seasons dressings, but it's not. It's actually the junk they put in the mix. As it turns out, though, you can make a dressing very similar to the Good Seasons Italian for a mere fraction of the cost, with none of the chemical junk. What's more, it allows you to change the recipe to emphasize the flavors you like best.

A Nice Christmas Gift

Get some mason jelly jars at the store. The jelly jars have a pretty "quilted" pattern on the jar, and have a 1-piece decorated cap instead of a standard 2-piece cap. An 8-ounce jelly jar holds enough mix for 8 cruits of dressing. I'm making up packages of 2 8-ounce jelly jars, plus a chrome wire-handle coffee scoop, a bottle of safflower oil, and a bottle of vinegar, and some wooden salad bowls.

The gift boxes will cost me $20 to $25 each, but because the dressing mix is worth so much more than the cost to make it, they'd probably sell for $50 to $60 at Hickory Farms. The nicest thing is that this is no compromise elegance, which makes a statement in itself: My respect for you is sterling.

Some Preparation

Spices vary a lot and I suggest that you make this recipe with entirely fresh spices. You can't be sure how long a spice has been on the shelf at the supermarket, so you'll want to pick the most popular brands (which you can judge by the shelf space consumed) at a store that sells a lot of spices (which you can judge by the shelf space consumed.)

Furthermore, I'd recommend that you make a couple of the spices yourself. You might be able to get away with using a food processor for this, but I recommend getting a coffee mill. You don't want to use the same coffee mill for both coffee and spices, because your coffee will taste terrible, but it's OK to use your "spice mill" for different spices simply by wiping it after each grinding job with a wet towel. They make some really nice, really expensive coffee mills, and for coffee, it may be worth it, but for spices, a cheap "hammer mill" coffee grinder (about $8) will do just fine.

Garlic Powder and Onion Powder

Start by mashing some garlic cloves, and putting them on a cookie sheet. Mince up some onion and put it on another cookie sheet. Stick these in your oven and turn the temperature to 160F. That's the lowest temperature that my digital oven will allow me to set, but I don't think that's a coincidence; that's the temperature most dehydrating units aim for. You can use a dehydrator if you already have one, but an oven will work just fine.

You can tell when the stuff is done. The garlic will be really crumbly. Grind the garlic until you have a nice powder, and then do the same with the onion. You'll use the leftover powder in your other cooking in the near future. If you prefer to cook with garlic salt or onion salt, you'd mix 1/3 powder with 2/3 salt. Kosher salt is too coarse for that recipe to work right; it doesn't pack as tightly as regular table salt, so you would need to use 4 parts salt with 1 part of powder, and use correspondingly more seasoning in what you're cooking.

Celery Salt and Pepper

Celery salt is sometimes ground celery seed mixed with salt, and sometimes ground celeriac root (celeriac or "celery root" isn't really celery, but it has a similar taste) mixed with salt. With either one of those, once you grind it, the flavor starts to deteriorate, so don't make up a huge batch. For a fairly standard mix, use 2 parts ground celery seed with 3 parts salt. I really like the flavor of celery, so I actually just use ground celery seed in the recipe instead of celery salt. Some commercial celery salt has other herbs in it. If you make a mix of 1 part ground dill weed, 2 parts ground celery seed, and 3 parts of salt, it makes a rather interesting seasoning where you previously used celery salt.

If you use store-bought ground spices for everything else, do not use store-bought ground pepper. It takes a while to grind any quantity at all, using a pepper mill instead of a coffee mill, of black pepper, but it's worth it. Fresh granulated pepper is rich, piquant, so flavorful that it will bring a tear to your eye. I get tellicherry pepper corns, but you may favor another kind. The ground pepper that comes from the supermarket is little different than the dust that you collect in your vacuum cleaner.

The Basic Recipe

We're making a fairly big batch of dressing mix here, but if you're using this for presents, you probably want to double or triple it. Given that salad dressing mix isn't used just for salad dressing, but in recipes like meat loaf, it's not going to go to waste!

• 1 Scoop Garlic Salt
• 1 Scoop Onion Powder
• 1 Scoop Sugar
• 2 Scoops Oregano
• 1 teaspoons ground pepper
• 1 teaspoon ground dill weed
• 1/2 teaspoon celery salt
• 2 Scoops salt

The "scoops" mentioned here are coffee scoops, which are two standard tablespoons in volume. Don't just grab a mixing spoon and assume that it holds a tablespoon; it doesn't. A teaspoon doesn't hold a standard teaspoon, either, but these are lesser quantities, so errors are less likely to screw you up.

Variations On A Theme

Did you notice the dill weed? I'm not sure there is any dill weed in Good Seasons. They use a little bit of thyme, too, which I've omitted. Mine is better. (I actually use more dill weed than I mention here, for my own use, but that much dill might be overpowering to someone not expecting it. I also include dried cilantro (yum!) in my own salad dressing, which isn't found in Good Seasons, but again, I omitted it from the dressing mix I'm giving away. (Maybe next year?)

Mix all this stuff thoroughly. It's not difficult to do. Then you seal it tightly against the air. When you're ready to make dressing, you add a coffee scoop (2 tablespoons) of mix to a quarter cup of vinegar and 2 tablespoons of water, agitate, then add 2/3 cups of oil and agitate again. It pays to wait 60 seconds before you add the oil, so that all the ingredients can be fully hydrated.

Paul Newman And Thee

Paul Newman got started in the salad dressing business by making up his Italian dressing, putting it in wine bottles, and giving it away for Christmas. Pretty soon, his Christmas list surpassed his ability to swig wine. Eventually, he started a company to sell the dressing, with the profits going to charitable purposes.

I think dressing mix makes more sense. Fresh tastes best when it's salad dressing. You can't do that very well with creamy dressings, though. Creamy dressings are a cross between this dressing mix and a homemade mayo. Basically, if you would emulsify an egg into vinegar and oil in a blender or food processor, then add powdered mustard, and add this mix, you'd end up with a dynamite creamy Italian dressing - but that's a bit too much work - and too much cleanup - for most people. French dressing needs some paprika and some tomato, making it still more of a hassle when all you really wanted to do was spill some salad greens from a bag into a bowl and dump on some dressing for a midnight snack.

But How Do You Package It?

What I need to do is to find out how suitable spring water bottles are for bottling salad dressing. Fifty years ago, I used to press crown caps onto Pepsi bottles, when we made ketchup, and you can still those long-necked beer bottles that take crown caps, but it's hard to find the cappers these days, and the caps. What's more, you need to refrigerate dressings. Ketchup has a lot of sugar in it, and you can leave it unrefrigerated for a year without any problem, but I sure wouldn't do that with a product that has egg in it, like mayo or creamy dressing!

It's too bad that there's nothing like a "mason ketchup bottle". I guess what I need to do is to recruit a bunch of winos. The line forms at the gutter, fellas!

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
bread - celery salt - cilantro - coffee mill - coffee scoop - crown caps - dill weed - drying garlic - drying onion - garlic salt - Good Seasons - Hickory Farms - Italian dressing - mason jelly jars - onion salt - pepper mill - safflower oil - salad - soup