Tao Salad Dressing - fresh and green!

 


Tao Salad Dressing – from the Tao of Cooking



Tao Restaurant style dinner with green Tao Dressing


This will be the freshest-tasting, most vibrant, delicious salad dressing you have ever had.



This is another recipe from the book The Tao of Cooking, which contains recipes from a great vegetarian restaurant that was in Bloomington, Indiana, for a number of years, mostly in the 1970's. The recipe in my previous blog entry, Butternut Squash and Leek Soup, also came from this book. As mentioned before, my husband Richard and I would go to the Tao Restaurant and have a collection of foods that we came to call a “Tao Supper” (a recreated one at home is shown in the photo at the top). This book is still available for purchase. I guarantee you'll want to try the Creamy Parmesan dressing, too. Both salad dressings were immensely popular at the restaurant and at the associated Rudi's Bakery and Deli, where I worked for a year.

And they are easy to make!

On to the green Tao Dressing:


As always, we start at the garden …



There are plenty of very green ingredients in this, as you can tell. First, I collected some Italian Flat Leaf parsley. Any kind of parsley will do, but this one has more flavor and it's what we've been growing in the Grow City Teaching Garden. It's at the bottom of the above photo.



Another ingredient I could collect from Grow City Teaching Garden was the dill. This photo was taken earlier in the summer. This one is in flower, but it will keep flowering and seeding for a long time. You can use the fine, ferny leaves, the flowering heads, or the heads in green or dry seed. For this recipe, we need some leaves, which you can see below the flower head.




Other green things needed are basil and spinach. The Sweet basil is from our home garden. The baby spinach leaves are from the grocery store because there were none available in any of our gardens, including Grow City, at the time.

Other ingredients pictured: salad oil (I used sunflower oil, which is light and has little flavor), mayonnaise, yogurt (this is my homemade), apple cider vinegar, honey (this is from the hives of our former next-neighbor-down-the-road, which is as local as can be without having our own hives). We will also be using a little salt and pepper.

Now, let's make this!


Here's the recipe:




Notice that it uses very small amounts of any of the green ingredients. Yet, it still yields a very green dressing.

First, put all of the ingredients in the blender except for the oil: greens, yogurt, mayonnaise, vinegar, honey, salt and pepper.



Almost all of the ingredients in the blender, oil waiting at the side


Then puree them all until smooth.

Turn the blender to low speed and keep it running. Slowly pour in the oil in a thin stream.




After all the oil is in and well blended, turn the blender on high speed (put the cap back on first!) Puree on high speed a tiny bit longer until the mixture is nice and thick.

And there you have it!!



Pour this into a nice cruet or small pitcher and enjoy! Be sure to share salad with one or more other people so they can also enjoy this very green fresh goodness! I once brought to a summer gathering a large salad with various ingredients, topped with nasturtium blooms (edible flowers with a bright, peppery flavor, and very pretty) and provided Tao Dressing with it. People loved it!


Be sure to grow these in your garden: parsley, basil, dill, and spinach.

- Parsley is a biennial, so it will want to bolt, flower and go to seed the second year, but it's all about the leaves the first year. Besides using fresh, it can be preserved by freezing.

- Dill, as I mentioned, can be used in various stages, and I used it in a couple of the previous blog posts. It reseeds readily, so you may have more coming up later in the season or the next year.

- Spinach needs to grow during cool weather, so it is planted in early spring or for a fall garden. There is one called Gigante d'Inverno that is more cold-tolerant and, as the name implies, has very large leaves.

- And Basil … well, Basil is so easy! Just try to keep the flowering stalks snipped off so that the plant will put its energy into the leaves. Otherwise, it will start producing very small leaves. There are so many types of basil, too, so experiment! You can direct-seed basil or start some seed indoors and then transplant seedlings, or just buy plants. It also does well as a container plant.



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