A Classic Stinky Cheese Salad Dressing 

Suzy F. emailed and asked if I had a good recipe for Roquefort dressing. The recipe below is a classic and easy to prepare at home. It calls for using Roquefort cheese, hence the name, but I recommend you substitute any blue cheese available like Danish Blue or one of the new American Blue Cheeses.

Why? Because classic Roquefort cheese costs 3 to 4 times as much as these other cheeses and when you combine Roquefort with the other ingredients you loose much of its intense flavor.

Roquefort is a stinky cheese and if you like strong, stinky cheeses, I urge you to try it on it’s own.  It’s a sheep’s milk cheese from France that goes back centuries and may be the most complex cheese you ever try.

Ingredients

¼ cup sour cream
1/3 cup buttermilk
1 ½ cups mayonnaise
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
½ teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
¼ teaspoon Tabasco
5 ounces of Blue Cheese (Roquefort or some other style)

How to Make Roquefort Dressing at Home

Combine all the ingredients except for the cheese in a bowl and whisk them until smooth. Crumble in t he blue cheese and mix together gently if you like clumps of cheeses in your dressing or more agressivily if you like it more smooth.

If you want it really smooth, you may want to combine everything in a blender but I think you loose the mouth feel when you loose the texture from the chunks of blue cheese.

Taste and adjust seasonings with a little salt & pepper. Serve on greens or try it on grilled chicken breasts. I bet it would work well with steamed or grilled vegetables like asparagus.

For lunch my wife put together this simple but delicious tuna salad served with fresh tomatoes. There must be hundreds of ways to make tuna salad depending on what you have on hand. I love these types of recipes that you create by making it up as you go along. Trouble is sometimes they are hard to duplicate.

Ingredients

2 cans tuna (packed in water)
1 stalk celery
1 hard-boiled egg
1-teaspoon fresh dill
1-tablespoon pickle relish
1-tablespoon mustard (my wife used French’s)
Mayonnaise to taste
Salt & pepper to taste

Prep the Ingredients

Dice the celery, chop up the hard-boiled egg and get the rest of the ingredients nearby.
Open the can of tuna and squeeze out the excess water.

How to Make Tuna Salad

In a medium sized mixing bowl, add the tuna and break it up some. Not too much though. The chunks look nice when serving however the more you break it up the further it will go.

Add the celery, egg, dill, relish, mustard and a little bit of mayonnaise. Mix it together with a fork being careful not to overwork it. Depending how you like it or if you are on a diet or not, adjust the amount of mayonnaise.

Taste and adjust seasonings with salt and pepper.

My wife served this with a tomato that she cut up into eighths and arranged on a plate with the tuna salad inside. She finished it off with a sprig of fresh dill on top.

Simple but makes a nice lunch.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about arugula in Walnut Vinaigrette Over Wilted Arugula, a tasty salad that requires sautéing. Now I would like to tell you about a great salad recipe adapted from one of my favorite cookbooks, Jacques Pepin’s Table called Arugula and Olive Salad that is served with a simple lemon dressing.

Remember, arugula is aromatic salad green but has a bitter, peppery taste. You either love it or hate it. A good way to develop a taste for it is to add a little to your favorite salad greens like red leaf lettuce.

Homemade Croutons

This recipe calls for making homemade croutons that are easy to prepare and a lot tastier than any of the commercial brands out there without all the extra stuff they put in them. Saying that, not everyone has the time or desire to make croutons from scratch so skip this step and use your favorite flavor store bought brand.

If you do decide to make your own, why not make a bunch for another meal. Stored in an airtight container they will last up to a week but you can freeze them for up to 6 months. I’m always looking for ways to make future meals just that much easier.

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