Dinner planning started with a CSA box and the vague notion of making one of the two salad dressings I’d pinned from Saveur’s article on favorite American salad dressings. I knew that both involved sour cream and mayonnaise, and made a point to have those on hand.
Upon arriving home from CSA pickup at 7pm, I realized I was missing several ingredients for both the Green Goddess and the Ranch dressings, I’d bookmarked. I did however, have a head of Boston lettuce and some lovely carrots, and so I came up with the dressing below, loosely based on Green Goddess.
Rose and I both found the dressing delicious. Shane’s taste buds are all weird due, presumably, to copious quantities of pain medication. We chose to disregard his neutral review.
The pasta was supposed to be Penne alla Vodka, but I didn’t have all the ingredients for that either. Instead we had a creamy, cheesy, tomatoey dish that I will never be able to recreate.
• Decadent Pale Green Dressing •
adapted from Saveur’s Green Goddess dressing
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1/2 cup sour cream
2-4 anchovy fillets (depending on how you feel about anchovies – we liked it with 4)
2 teaspoons white wine vinegar
2 teaspoons lemon juice
1 cup fresh, flat leaf parsley leaves
Combine all ingredients in a medium sized, deep bowl or a food processor. Blend (with hand blender if not using food processor) until smooth. Serve over Boston lettuce with shredded carrots and cannellini beans.
ah man. i hate those delicious dinners that you have no idea what you did and why it worked out so well. Cause then they move in to the “stuff of legend” category, and even if you were vaguely or perfectly able to recreate it, your mind would still refuse and think something was “not quite right” or “not as good as that one time”, cause we shoved the memory into “pantheon” status.
Glad the dinner was nice though.
p.s. i know this feeling all to well as i performed this very feat with a lasagna i made 11 years ago that Rob still talks about. he has finally given up on ever having that lasagna again.
My mom used to say “You like it? Well, enjoy it because you’ll never have it again.”