Department of Salad Bonus Recipe: A Very Sassy New Dressing 🫒
You have all your vinaigrettes; now it's time to try Olive Island Dressing. It's chunky, creamy, spicy: perfect for an iceberg wedge. It might even be good jet fuel. It's that powerful.
I’LL KEEP THE SALAD PATTER TO A minimum, even though it goes against my nature, and just say that I’ve been experimenting with my dream version of the Thousand Island concept on and off for probably a thousand years.
Several of the variants have included an abundance of green olives, and after we tasted the last one of these, the feeling in the salad lab was: Oh, hell yes. Give me the olives. Give me lots of olives. So we decided to send that recipe out to you ahead of the regular upcoming issue, as a little treat.
It employs the common pimiento-stuffed olives that come in a tall skinny jar for some reason, and which I’ve always thought of as “salad olives”—small, oily, salty, meaty Manzanillas available in every grocery store. I’ve got a particular affection for them, possibly thanks to the many cream-cheese-and-olive sandwiches I was fed as a child, while under suspicion of having an ulcer when what I really had was a neurotic personality and a proneness to stomach aches.
I think this sandwich was considered something bland to eat because of the cream cheese. It’s far from bland. And even though it reminds me of going to the hospital for ulcer tests as a nerdy little kid, I continue to love this sandwich spread to this very day, a testament to its deliciousness. You can eat it on white toast; I tend to eat it on saltines. And I am no longer prone to stomachaches. Make of that what you will.
Here’s the downloadable recipe for cream cheese and olives, which we published in the very earliest days of the Department of Salad.
And since I promised I wouldn’t get too talky today, I’m going straight to the recipe for the new dressing, which I am calling Olive Island. It has the alluring elements of Thousand Island, without all the sweetness and with a very healthy spice kick. You can use it anywhere you’d use Thousand Island: On any particularly crisp lettuce and/or vegetable salad, on sandwiches, with a prawn cocktail, on an iceberg wedge—or on a stack of iceberg, as in this photo of the old-school blue cheese we gave you a while back:
Here’s that recipe, while we’re at it!
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*RECIPE: Olive Island Dressing
Makes about 1½ cups
Like blue cheese, ranch, and Green Goddess, this creamy dressing is perfect and pretty on a wedge. But my favorite way to eat it is to spoon it generously onto a giant bowl of thinly shredded iceberg mixed with a handful of very thinly sliced white onion. Toss this all together thoroughly to coat the crunchy lettuce; season with salt and pepper; serve.
1 cup mayonnaise (I prefer Duke’s)
2 tablespoons sour cream
3 tablespoons Sriracha (if you use another, similar hot sauce, makes sure you taste as you go)
½ cup finely chopped green salad olives (aka the small, oily, salty, meaty Manzanillas available in every grocery store)
½ cup plus 1 tablespoon roughly chopped cornichons
2 tablespoons finely chopped red onion
1 tablespoon chopped chives
2 teaspoons honey
Juice of 1 lemon (about 2 tablespoons)
1 tablespoon champagne vinegar (or white wine vinegar)
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste.
In a large bowl, combine all ingredients; whisk or stir until well incorporated. Taste. Adjust seasonings. Refrigerate until chilled through. This is better after at least one night in the fridge, stored in an airtight container.
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Just one word because I'm rendered speechless: yum. Yes, a social media cliché but it's all I can say.
This sounds so good! Adding iceberg lettuce to my grocery list. Emily, I wish I could hang out in the salad lab with you and the boys😍