Food & Wine (June 2009)
After kicking off Clay's birthday dinner with that gorgeous chilled pea soup, we knew we wanted to serve a light, summery salad. But we weren't quite sure what kind of dressing we wanted, so we turned to the food magazines for inspiration.
The June issue of Food & Wine has a great little item on their "Best 5-minute Dressings." It's a perfect feature for this time of year, when salad greens and vegetables are so abundant but you don't want to stick to the same salad night after night. And if you're like us, you may be in a salad rut, always making the same dressings.
The dressings in Food & Wine sounded so good and looked so easy that we were quickly confronted with a new problem: how to decide which one to make?
So we didn't decide on one. We decided on three! We ended up serving a trio of mini summer salads for the dinner.
And we started the progression off with this Honey-Lemon Dressing.
The name of this dressing pretty much says it all: other than honey and lemon, the only ingredients are thyme, olive oil and salt and pepper.
If anything, the only surprise is that it takes far less than five minutes to pull this together. Seriously, the most time-consuming aspect is pulling the thyme from the sprigs.
We paired this dressing with watercress and fresh sugar snap peas from our CSA. (Food & Wine offers additional pairing ideas, including carrot salad, fennel salad, mixed green salad and a citrus salad.)
Watercress has a great sharp, spicy bite that made a terrific balance with the sweet, lemony dressing. And the snap peas, which we blanched by dropping them in near-boiling water for a few minutes and then doused in an ice bath, added a terrific crunch -- each gorgeous little green pea was a burst of farm-fresh flavor.
All in all, a fantastic new go-to dressing to spice up our salads!
Do you have a favorite salad dressing that you make? Let us know! We'd love to try it.
Honey-Lemon Dressing
Food & Wine (June 2009)
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(This Photo: Food & Wine)
TOTAL TIME: 5 MIN
SERVINGS: Makes 1/2 cup
Ingredients
* 1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
* 1 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest
* 1 tablespoon honey
* 1/2 teaspoon chopped thyme
* 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
* Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
Directions
1. In a small bowl, whisk the lemon juice with the lemon zest, honey and thyme. Whisk in the olive oil and season with salt and pepper.
Notes
Great With Watercress salad, carrot salad, fennel salad, mixed green salad, citrus salad.
