Honey Mustard Salad Dressing and Hubs' Giant Salad

Ingredients

1/2 cup dijon mustard

1/4 cup ethically sourced honey*

1/2 to 1 teaspoon cider vinegar

1/2 teaspoon turmeric

1/2 teaspoon paprika

*To make this recipe vegan, substitute agave nectar instead of honey. Same amount.

Step One

Mix the dijon, honey or agave, and 1/2 teaspoon vinegar in a small bowl. Taste it. If it's too sweet, add the other 1/2 teaspoon vinegar. Stir. Taste. Adjust.

Step Two

Add the turmeric and paprika. Stir. Taste. Adjust. Add more seasonings if you like.

Notes

Previously, my favorite honey mustard was the kind they have at Subway. This one comes pretty close and it's easy to keep tweaking it until it's perfect for you. For me, while I need a little vinegar for the tang, if I can taste it, it's too much. If your tastes are like mine (can you say sweet tooth?) then you'll enjoy this, and it's super easy.

I like to make enough for a couple of uses.

I pour this dressing over the giant, full-meal salads my hubs makes for us. These are frequently lunches for us. Delicious, and so healthy to eat all those raw veggies, which he chops up by hand, shunning the food processor in favor of his precise dicing technique. The man's an artist.

Bonus: Hubs Giant Meal-Salad

My beloved makes a mean salad. He starts with a mix of lettuces and spinach, then adds tomatoes, celery, peppers, scallions, finely minced carrot. He chops up an apple as well, or sometimes splits white grapes instead. Adding a bit of fruit to a salad makes my heart sing. Mushrooms for me, heated up first. For extra protein, he'll sometimes rinse and drain a can of black beans, and scatter a handful into each bowl. He tops them, too, with sesame seeds or slivered almonds.

The secret that makes his salads so excellent is the precise dicing and slicing and shredding of the veggies. It takes him a half hour to put them together because everything has to be just so–just right for primo eating. In a restaurant, when they plunk down a "salad" with a quarter-head of iceberg lettuce, his reaction is rather like Willie Scott's, when she was served eyeball soup in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

I almost went with the chilled monkey brains there, but then I remembered, this is a meat-free blog.