Now that you know how to make a basic vinaigrette salad dressing, you can make this easy chicken recipe.
Salad dressing is a relatively expensive item in the market, but it’s amazingly easy to make your own. This is my basic vinaigrette recipe. You can vary it by substituting different vinegars (balsamic, raspberry, etc.) or lemon or lime juice, or adding blue cheese crumbles and/or fresh herbs. If I’m using the dressing right away, I use all olive oil. However, if it will be stored in the fridge, the olive oil will solidify. Using part Canola helps solve this problem. This recipe makes about 1½ cups, but if you keep the approximate proportions, you can make as much or as little as you want.
So you would like to spend less on food. This is one of the easiest places to trim the budget, but it will require a little effort on your part.
The single best way to save money on food is to learn to cook!
It is usually much cheaper to purchase ingredients rather than prepared meals. The results are more nutritious and frequently lower in sodium, fat, and calories.[1] With a little bit of practice, your meals will taste a lot better than the packaged, frozen “convenience foods” available at the market. Cooking doesn’t have to use a lot of time or expensive ingredients. Plus, it just feels satisfying to serve a meal you made yourself.
Learning to cook isn’t hard. A recent Amazon search turned up 93,928 cookbooks, while a Google search turned up 98,400,000 hits for “recipe.” Most functional adults are able to follow at least simple directions for preparing a dish.
I never learned to cook when I was growing up, so I had to figure things out on my own. Since I was a college student at the time, it seemed totally logical to pick up a textbook and start reading. At the time, the most popular comprehensive cookbook was The Joy of Cooking, so that is what I read. It provided a solid foundation that still serves me today. The fun started when I got to the point where I could wing it, inventing my own recipes as I went along.
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