Jennifer Cornbleet: For an elegant sit down dinner, I would like to follow the tradition of three courses. This arrangement not only looks attractive, it slows down the eating process, which improves digestion. You might want to start off with a soup or a salad as a starter, then move on to an on tray on it’s own plate or maybe with a vegetable side dish, and then for special occasions finish with a healthy dessert.
So, let’s go on to our first course, we are going to be preparing a creamy salad dressing that’ll go on a salad of romaine lettuce and tomatoe. Having a couple of creamy salad dressings on hand makes it easier to eat a lot more salad. I’m going to be making everyone’s favorite ranch dressing, but without the dairy. You can make a delicious ranch dressing using soaked cashews. So, let’s get started. I’m using a blender and I soak these cashews just for a couple of hours to soften them up enough to blend or you could soak them over night. This is one of my favorite creamy dressings, but there are so many other possibilities. In my book raw food made easy I also have creamy tomatoe and cucumber dressings, honey mustard dressing, Tahini lemon dressing. The more salad dressings you can make, the more salad you are going to eat. I’m going to add a little bit of water to this blender and if you seasonings, we are going to use some natural salt.
Let me just talk about salt for a moment. When you are thinking about what salt to buy, look for salt with some color in it. A little gray or little bit of pink that means it still got some minerals, it might be a rock salt or it might be sea salt, doesn’t matter, but look for some color for those minerals. I’m also going to add some lemon juice to it and that’s going to give it a nice zingy tang almost a cheesy flavor. And then two very important seasonings onion powder and garlic powder that’s what’s really going to give it that ranch taste. The reason I’m using onion powder and garlic powder instead of fresh onion and garlic is that the powders have more of a muted flavor, almost a cooked flavor smoky and that’s what’s going to a make it taste like ranch. So, I’ll go ahead and add some of each of those and then it will blend. I’m going to be adding fresh herbs to this, but the reason I’m not doing that yet is because I want this to be a white creamy dressing with flexive green, and if I added the herbs now, it would be a green dressing.
So, let’s go ahead and blend. I can see that it’s quite thick, so I’ll just add a little bit more water. I’m just using a regular conventional blunder for this recipe and all the other recipes in my DVD. You don’t need to buy a really fancy expensive blender to make things creamy and to make it work. Of course, if you get really into raw foods, eventually you might want to invest in a high speed blender, they can blend larger quantities or they can handle a lot of nuts in a thick mixture, but this basic blender works fine for dressings, soup, smoothies all the things that we are doing today. So, we are almost done, I’m going to add some fresh basil and fresh dill and that’s going to give a nice herby flavor to the dressing. If you don’t have fresh on hand, just go ahead and add some dry dill and dry basil. And you can vary the herbs too; you could use cilantro that would be nice parsley, and now I’m just going to briefly blend this just to incorporate the herbs without turning the whole dressing green.
And it’s looking so good. I’ll pour that out. And this dressing also doubles as a ranch dip. You could make it a little bit thicker just add a little less water and you could serve this with those cuted vegetable sticks at any party. This creamy ranch dressing is so delicious it rivals any traditional version; it’s one of favorites.
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