Oregon Transplant: The Best Raspberry Vinaigrette

plus a salad recipe!

I love a good raspberry vinaigrette. Until recently however, I've been buying it at the store. Eek. Commercial salad dressings top a lot of foodie lists of the worst processed food items you can buy. Full of preservatives, artificial flavors and colors, and dun dun dun, waaaaay too much sugar. Preservatives I can see, but artificial flavors and colors? Look at that gorgeous raspberry color! Why would you need to artificially color that? And I'm pretty sure some commercial raspberry vinaigrettes don't even contain much of real raspberries. Well, I can tell you with ease, there are more than a few real raspberries in this dressing.

This has to be one of the best raspberry vinaigrette recipes I've tried. And I've tried quite a few recipes. Recipes that had way too much vinegar and very little raspberry. Recipes that had way too much sugar and very little vinegar. Recipes that were bitter. Recipes that were way too sweet. Recipes that were too thin. It wasn't until I came up with this recipe that I was finally satisfied. This isn't your typical vinaigrette. It's thick, creamy, and for lack of a better word, luscious. The texture kind of reminds me of honey mustard. And it works. It's a very versatile dressing, good for lettuce, spinach, veggies, fruit, meat, nuts, etc.

One of my favorite salads to put raspberry vinaigrette on is a spinach salad. I've been making this salad (with commercial raspberry vinaigrette) for years. Years upon years. One of my friends brought a version of this salad to "Family Dinner" when the hubby and I were still living in our first apartment in Portland. "Family Dinner" was basically the hubby and I, plus a couple of his co-workers and their significant others getting together to share dinner and episodes of "Nip/Tuck". You know, in "Nip/Tuck"s heyday. We called it "Family Dinner" because one of the couple's family lived in Minnesota and the rest of us, well, our families lived not quite close. Each week, one couple would prepare dinner for the group. The next week, a different couple would prepare the meal. Ah, the early 20's. When friends were your family. Good times. I was introduced to quite a few "new-to-me" foods during that time. One being this salad. Spinach, red apples and red grapes, gorgonzola cheese, and raspberry vinaigrette. Yummy!

After being introduced to this salad, I began to reserve it for special occasions and I usually served it with steak. I remember 2 or 3 Valentine's Day menus that included a New York strip and this lovely salad. These days, I make it more often that once a year. And it goes perfectly with quite a few proteins- chicken breasts, fish fillets such as cod, halibut, tilapia, even salmon, pork tenderloin. You get the idea. This salad makes a great side dish. And don't limit your use of this dressing to this salad. The dressing goes quite well with lots of toppings, as I mentioned before.

So, it's November 17 and here in NE Kentucky, we run the risk of getting some snow today. I'm not too worried, the temperature has been quite warm around here. It was 43º yesterday and it only got down to 35º last night. We are sitting firmly at 37º right now, so I'm thinking we might miss this first winter storm. I can only hope. I'm not ready for snow because once it starts, we'll probably be dealing with snow here until March. Maybe April, like last year. Ick. Can you tell I'm not a winter person? He he.

All right, I'm out. The hubby says I need to be home by noon today, because that's when the snow is supposed to start. We went back and forth on this, me saying it should be too warm, him saying the snow could fall hard and fast and then it wouldn't matter if the temperature is too high. I'm not a snow driver though, so I fully plan on being home by noon. So-- off to run my errands :)

Happy Monday! Have a fantastic week everyone!