Basics: Salad Dressings
In the pursuit of building our tool chest of recipes in Paprika, this week I'm offering up a simple vinaigrette with a half dozen variations. I know this is barely a recipe, but just download it and put it in Paprika and do your best to remember it next time you're staring at one leftover lemon in your fruit bowl.
Having said that, there is a bit of history to this recipe which honestly is not that important unless you want to know more about why I am so passionate about cooking or more accurately, kitchen management. I'll go ahead and post the Paprika file now, and if you want to know the whole story, read on.
Why I love Martha
This "recipe" comes by way of my first real cookbook: Martha Stewart's Great Food Fast. I can see in Amazon I ordered this book almost 20 year ago- a time when I was really assuming my family role as the person who was going to put food on the table, and quite honestly this one book changed everything. I know there are lots of loose opinions on who Martha Stewart is, and for many she's just as much a SNL parody of herself as anything else. But if you read her cookbooks- particularly her earlier, practical books- you realize that she has a really powerful, simple, and in my opinion, important message which is also effectively the caption to every face shot of Martha I have ever seen: Can You Please Just Get Your Shit Together. She argues that cooking good, fresh food is important for the health of your family both nutritionally and socially and entertaining guests with a meal is a skill well worth developing and will reap countless benefits. Additionally, she makes it perfectly clear that being "too busy" is not an excuse for anything, much less something as important as feeding your family or friends. She acknowledges occasionally that this can be a lot of work, but honestly, just get your shit together. Plan ahead, build your skills, stock your kitchen with the right tools, shop efficiently and treat this like the important job that it is. This really made a lot of sense to me in 2007, and 20 years later this message is as true for me as it ever was.
Friends who know I cook a lot ask me if I like cooking. The answer is not particularly. I mean it's fine, and I do like being good at something, but what I'm certainly not good at is being a chef- at least in the classical, artistic sense. Anyone can see from these emails that I'm just regurgitating other people's recipes- and they aren't really the point of this newsletter anyway. What I'm good at- and what I'm trying to help you with- is the routine and method of putting a new, nutritious, practical meal on the table every day, every week, year after year, decade after decade, and learning how to be resourceful with whats in your kitchen. It's my job and maybe yours, too. Recipes that used to take me an hour to put together I can now do in 35 minutes. The idea of baking something for breakfast was ridiculous 10 years ago, now it's as easy as making coffee. Entertaining for 15 people is just another day at the office. When my wife sees an empty kitchen, I have a library of 1000 ideas on what to do with what we have. I have learned countless tiny things to make all of this go smoothly. I use Paprika to plan my weekly menu, and do all my shopping for the week on Sunday morning. My shopping list is organized in Paprika by aisle, and the aisles are arranged in order to match my local grocery store, so I am in and out as soon as humanly possible. I plan my meals to have leftovers, and at the end of the week, our refrigerator is close to empty save for condiments and non perishables.
The beauty of this efficiency isn't just that it makes cooking like this possible from a time and budget standpoint, but additionally, a remarkable aspect of shopping for the entire week at once combined with having a large variety of recipes at your fingertips is that we throw out almost zero food. Like nothing. People seem to like what I make, and I have countless real chefs to thank for that, but ultimately what I take pride in is that I'm good at doing this every day, on time and on budget with almost no waste.
Anyway. This simple vinaigrette recipe embodies all of this. It's barely even a recipe. You have the ingredients sitting there- so go ahead and make the best, freshest salad dressing you can possibly find for a fraction of the cost, meanwhile maybe saving a lemon from the garbage. It takes less than 5 minutes and everyone who tastes it will like it, and like that you made it from scratch. Download it, and remember you have it the next time you plan for a salad or vegetables that need a dressing. It's the perfect first step to getting your shit together.