The Easiest, Healthiest, Delicious Salad Dressing, Ever

Got on the scale and its time for an oldie but goodie. Good tasting low calorie salad dressing. Gotta get ready for the Thanksgiving eat-a-thon.  Lose some, so there's room to eat. Back on the Fast Diet for me today.

Three simple ingredients:Deliciousness.

Along with the hundreds of cook books, I have a shelf of diet books. Partially because I have a background in nutrition, but mostly because I am perennially 10 pounds over where I’d like to be.  Weight Watchers, Atkins, Paleo, Hungry Girl, Sugar Busters, The Fast Diet: all the biggies are there, and truthfully while all the books have recipes in them; I’ve cooked very few things from them. 

The Fast Diet books at least, have real food in them, but others are full of weird substitutions, like onion rings encrusted with Fiber One. I tried the recipe and threw them all out. Please strike me dead if I ever even CONSIDER making onion rings encrusted with Fiber One again. Totally gross and I hope the author is ashamed of herself for perpetrating such awful, fake food. Those sort of recipes make one think that one can have a satisfying low calorie substitution for the real thing. You cannot. If I want onion rings, I'll eat the real thing. Most of those diet books are now huddled together on a bottom bookshelf like refugees in the hold of a ship. Bah humbug! to diet recipes.

I do have a “diet” recipe that I use quite often, for a salad dressing that actually didn’t come from a diet book. And its delicious! I’m sure it’s in one somewhere, though. It’s simply equal parts good quality balsamic vinegar and Dijon mustard. The recipe was actually explained to me by the mother of a young woman being treated for an eating disorder, as the only dressing the girl would eat. I was doing a clinical rotation at the time in a residential facility, and I was taking down notes from the mother who was talking about her daughter’s fear of fat in her food.

Later in the week, I was out of time one morning, and wanting a salad for lunch, I mixed the two ingredients in the bottom of my lunch container and took it with me. It’s delicious. Since then, I’ve messed with it, added some oil, a bit of garlic and a dab of sweetener, and it’s a good, quick go-to dressing. It’s good even in its original form, without any of my changes. You can however mess with it infinitely with different vinegars, mustards, seasonings, sweeteners etc. Hence, the name I’ve given it: Disordered Dressing.

So while I rarely have anything in my repertoire that came from a diet book, this little refugee is delicious.

Disordered Dressing

1T good Balsamic Vinegar

1T Dijon Mustard

1 teas. sugar or sweetener

2 teas. Olive Oil

Dash of garlic powder

Stir it all together until the sugar dissolves. Makes enough for 1 good sized serving.