Eat salad.

It's hot here, like the kind of hot where I cannot bring myself to walk outside at 10 in the morning to walk 12  feet to the garden. I spend a good part of the day bargaining with myself, trying to weasel my way out of the meal plan for the day so I can avoid turning on the stove. By the time I capitulate it is too late to stick with the plan and so we have been carving away at a 15 lb. ham, eating a lot of eggs, and frying hamburgers (not that that's any cooler, but it is fast and we really like burgers around here). Raw salads have been the mainstay side since I am just too fucking hot and lazy to cook a vegetable, but I want to love my salad, not just chew it. And I just cannot go one more night thinking of people pouring olive oil and vinegar on their salads and lying to themselves that it tastes good...a slimy leaf, an acid-bath leaf, a dry leaf...nor can I stomach the idea of people pouring (soybean oil, corn syrup, silica?!) bottled dressing all over their greens and calling it food. I actually die a little inside when I open a refrigerator and see bottled dressings. Enough that I am willing to pour olive oil and vinegar on my salad and lie to myself that it tastes great.  This heat is bringing out the winning-est points of my personality. I'll quit while I'm ahead. What I'm trying to say is, make your dressing at home. You will feel competent and thrifty and it will be delicious, and you will not be ingesting anti-caking agents.

Here's my basic dressing. We make three or four standard dressings and this is the easiest. I make it in a jam jar and get a few good runs out of a batch. Why does it taste so much better than just dousing your tender little green salad friends in olive oil and vinegar? I don't know, mustard seed magic?  Having it premixed in the refrigerator means that a can of tuna or smoked oysters and a bag of washed greens just turned into a lunch worth eating, versus a lunch worth wolfing down. A good quality balsamic will cost you a bit more but makes a world of difference.

Basic Balsamic Dressing

2 tablespoons Balsamic vinegar
3-4 tablespoons olive oil (I use extra virgin)
1 heaping teaspoon whole-grain Dijon mustard
cracked black pepper, about 1/4 teaspoon
optional: 1 clove crushed garlic

Put everything in the jam jar, hand it to the baby to shake and turn up the Chaka Khan, or shake it yourself, well, until you break a sweat in your hot kitchen. Stores well for ever in the refrigerator. I like to dress the whole salad before I serve it, tossing it with my hands so leaves are evenly coated.