My workday salads come with a very simple dressing of extra virgin olive oil, lemon juice and salt. I cannot tell you the measurements, it's just a glug, a good squeeze and a sprinkle, whisked together. It's a feel thing for me - entirely dependent on how much and what type of lettuce I am dressing and what else is in the salad and I do it so often that I can make it work every time.
I am constantly mixing ingredients together to make various salads and create a lot of my own dressings in this same haphazard way. But I love it when I do actually follow a recipe for a specific dressing where someone has carefully measured each of the ingredients to ensure it works just right for the particular salad. The dressings can be thick, thin, sweet, tart, creamy, crunchy... what they all do is transform a few items from the vege drawer into a flavourful dish. Kathy Paterson has given us a cut out and keep four pages of dressings that are designed for you to mix and match to dress any salad you may be concocting this summer.
Here's hoping the weather has sorted itself out this week because, after reading Laurie Black's column, I rather fancy a picnic . . . with champagne, just like Joanne's, who wins our reader recipe competition this week with her picnic salad recipe.
If you're feeling lucky, enter to win a Reid vintage bike and picnic set worth $1000.
