Scratch Cooking to support Organic Living

Thanks, Red, for posting your salsa recipe. I also totally agree with your comment from the Organic Living post that we can save a lot of money and also improve nutrition by cooking alot from scratch.

I make my own salad dressings, I was raised on simple viniagrettes and so I tend to be shocked when I see the huge salad dressing aisle, I wonder who is buying all of this dressing!

I use a store bought cruet and I just use the oil and vinegar lines on it. I use either safflower or olive oil with either balsamic or Braggs apple cider vinegar, a spoonful of dijon mustard, some dried herbs and a little bit of honey or sugar. I make a big bottle about once a week and eat it all week. I have also recently started washing a whole head of lettuce at a time and keeping it in the salad spinner in the fridge — I am more likely to have salad at lunch if the lettuce is ready to go.

I have learned from my husband to keep salads interesting by putting in lots of random stuff, so we often have nuts or seeds, fruit (apple, grapes, craisins or raisins), a mix of vegetables (red peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, etc) and or cheese on our salad. I don’t really love expensive mesclun mixes, so I use either red or green leaf lettuce. You can theme it up, go Italian with roasted red peppers and mozzarella in your salad, add crumbled bleu cheese, walnuts, diced apples and raisins to feel like you are at a restaurant, etc.

Do you have simple things, like salad dressing or salsa, that you could buy but make yourself instead? We buy a whole wheat pancake mix, but I am thinking that I could just mix up bags of my own and keep them in the freezer, we do this with the dry ingredients for our bread already, so the kids can make the bread without having to measure (and spill) the flour.