Cutting Calories: Salad Dressing
This morning, while I was writing up my recipe for the Earl Cobb Wrap along with my tricks for a fat free Ranch dressing, it put me in mind of another salad dressing trick that I learned from an amazing woman named Becky. One good dressing deserves another, so here goes.
Becky was the house cook at the treatment center where I worked before I got my promotion to be a SAHM. Cooking for over 30 teens, staffers, and teachers is a big job, and she was always trying to find ways to please the masses and cut calories.
Becky was an amazing salad maker. One day I asked her about the yummy, creamy dressing she used and she told me the secret: non-fat cottage cheese.
If there’s a creamy salad dressing you love, but that is loaded with fat and calories, mix it with non-fat cottage cheese. The cheese juice (moisture, liquid?) takes on the dressing flavor seamlessly, but you cut back on the bad stuff.
I recently made a sweet spinach salad using this method. Spinach, cucumbers, tomatoes, cranberries, apple slices, slivered almonds, and dressing made of 1 part poppy seed dressing and 2 parts fat free cottage cheese. I find that ratio to be about as far as you can stretch it and still have the dressing flavor. If that’s too diluted for your tastes, then you can always add a bit more dressing.
