Salad Dressing Mix

A Simple Salad Dressing (and a Homemade Brick of Bread)

A dressing I could eat every day, and a very proud nine-year-old baker.

I love the salads they sell at Real Foods Market, and the dressing they use is so simple to make at home. It's just Bragg's Apple Cider Vinegar, extra virgin olive oil, sea salt, and black pepper.

Real Foods Market–Style Salad Dressing

Makes enough for a salad or two

Bragg's Apple Cider Vinegar

Extra virgin olive oil (about twice as much oil as vinegar, to taste)

Sea salt

Black pepper

Mix it all together in a little cup and pour it over your salad or veggies. That's it. When I have fresh basil and tomatoes from the garden, I add those in too. And oh, the basil, tomatoes, and raw goat feta with this dressing, all over some cooked eggplant, tastes incredible.

Pictured above is the salad my husband and I shared tonight. The kids were too full from some bread my oldest son had made, so I threw together a quick salad just for the two of us: organic lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, raw goat feta, and that dressing.

I did discover, to my great disappointment, that we are completely out of red onions. I LOVE red onions in my salads, so that was a sad little moment in my evening!

The dressing tasted so good that I made a whole second batch, cut up some cucumbers, and happily ate them with my son. My husband, poor guy, didn't get a single bite!

My son's honey wheat bread

Now for that bread the kids were so full on. My nine-year-old made it completely himself. He ground up the wheat, and then he made up his very own recipe. He added warm water, honey, yeast, and sea salt to the flour. And since we were out of eggs, he used a little ground flax seed with water and some aluminum-free baking powder in place of an egg. (A "flax egg" is a wonderful trick to know.)

I'll be honest, it came out looking a bit like a brick. But every single one of the kids loved it! It was surprisingly moist, and it disappeared fast.

(A quick note for my celiac friends, since this is a wheat loaf: this one is for the wheat-eaters in our house, not for me. I was cheering from the sidelines. If you'd like, I can share a gluten-free honey bread another day.)

One little tip, in case you make bread with your own kids: if we'd done it the more traditional way, we would have soaked the ground flour in water with a splash of whey and let it ferment first. That lets the bread rise without yeast and makes the grains gentler on the tummy, for those who eat wheat.

Honestly, this was pretty impressive for a nine-year-old who wasn't even following a recipe. I told him he was now the official family "bread-making expert," and that Sage was our "soup-making expert."

He was not having that. "Uh-uh," he said. "NO way. I am a soup expert ALSO!"

I absolutely LOVE my kids. They make me laugh all the time.

Love,

Steffanie

Shared with love from our kitchen. A gentle note on the raw goat feta: raw-milk cheeses are a personal favorite of ours, but they can carry a small risk of bacteria like listeria, so if you're pregnant, feeding little ones, or have a weakened immune system, you may want to choose an aged or pasteurized cheese instead. As always, check labels and do what's right for your family.