Salad Dressing

Vibrantly colored and spiced, this creamy dressing is great drizzled over your favorite salad, grain bowl, or cooked veggies. Fresh turmeric will give you the best flavor and health benefits, but if you can't find it, ground dried turmeric works too.

Made creamy with sieved egg yolk, this dressing is also especially delicious when spooned over sliced beets or boiled and cooled asparagus, green beans, or cauliflower.

Tender spinach is tossed with sliced fennel bulb and sweet pears in this simple salad that delivers complex flavor. Make it an entree salad by adding 4 ounces of grilled chicken per person.

From the kitchen of food blogger Hilary Finch Hutler of tummyrumblr.com comes beautiful and fresh take on a classic salad combination: fruit, nuts, and cheese. Toasted hazelnuts are the perfect match for sweet, ripe pears, and finely grated vintage cheddar cheese adds plenty of interest to the classic buttermilk dressing.

This is a perfect autumn salad: not so much cooked as wilted greens in a warm, savory-sweet vinaigrette. Here in the South, we are lucky to have so many different greens that grow remarkably well virtually all year round. From the traditional collards, spinach, mustard, and turnip greens to the international varieties that have recently made their way here, including bok choy, tatsoi, and komatsuna, there are a variety of tastes and textures to choose from. No matter where you live, experiment with seasonal greens until you find your favorites. If you're shopping at the farmers' market, most of the vendors will be happy to let you have a few nibbles for taste-testing. The same goes for the squash—you can use butternut, acorn, pumpkin, African, or any similar variety. At Summerland Farm, we are lucky to have American chestnut trees planted by my ancestors, and even luckier that those trees survived the chestnut blight that killed most American chestnuts in the first half of the twentieth century. Fresh chestnuts—often grown in California—are available in many natural foods stores in the cooler months. If you can't find chestnuts, hazelnuts or cashews would make a good substitute.

**Editor's note:**Use this recipe to make Ali Larter's Winter Lettuces with Pomegranate Seeds . This is an everyday dressing that is wonderful on all variations of lettuces and vegetables. It's a welcome change from bottled dressing and so easy to make.

This dressing is served on the side with Junior's Reuben sandwiches. It's so good that you'll find many other foods it matches up perfectly with, like sliced roasted turkey or chicken salad, a cold poached salmon salad, cold roast beef, or a fresh tomato salad.

Make ahead: Store, covered, in the fridge for up to 2 days.
Save time: Use 2 2/3 cups cooked triticale berries and omit soaking and cooking the raw grains.

We think our wedge salad recipe is the ultimate iteration, but we're not opposed to innovation—like these embellishments and swaps.

Why do I love roast winter vegetables? For starters, because they are fresh, local, and seasonal. Unlike summer produce, they keep for a long time without losing most of their flavor. They feel like winter food: hearty, substantial, rib-sticking. Francis Mallmann quick-roasts them at very high heat in a wood oven until they almost burn. A home oven doesn't put out that kind of thousand-degree heat, but when something as simple as slices of Delicata squash are coated with a little bit of olive oil, sprinkled with kosher or coarse sea salt, and then roasted, they come out of the oven chewy, nutty, sweet, and savory. Part caramelization, part umami, and part Maillard. This dish is a slight adaptation of a recipe in Yotam Ottolenghi's Plenty, which I came across when I was asked to be a judge in Food52.com's "Tournament of Cookbooks." In case you don't know Yotam Ottolenghi's work—you'd never forget such a fun name—he is a London-based Israeli chef who writes a vegetarian column for the Guardian. He is not a vegetarian himself, which makes me trust his recipes even more. In other words, he is neither ideological nor moralistic about it: his only aim is food that tastes great. Caramelized and well-seasoned winter vegetables are fine by themselves, but the maple-mustard vinaigrette lifts the flavors enormously. We made this recipe for a New Year's Eve dinner, and afterward I received ooh-and-aah e-mails from people about "the best vegetables ever!" For sure, the company, the wine, and the other food had something to do with the reviews. But, taking all that into consideration, tell me, honestly, how often are people moved to praise a parsnip? A few years ago I would have said you need your own roast tomatoes for this recipe, but now I find that Desert Glory or similar deeply flavored cherry tomatoes, though they don't hold a candle to real summer tomatoes, are fine when caramelized.

This luscious three bean salad recipe combines GOYA® Red Kidney Beans, GOYA® Chick Peas, and GOYA® Blackeye Peas with crunchy fresh veggies, and a bright, lemony vinaigrette. You can be sure that this protein-packed, heart-healthy salad is just as nutritious as it is delicious!

It's low-cal and filling—as in perfect for swimsuit season. I make it a day ahead so the veggies can marinate and the flavor pops.

Russian dressing and Thousand Island dressing are often confused because both begin with a base of mayonnaise and ketchup or ketchup-style chili sauce, which results in a pink salad dressing. But where Thousand Island is a bit sweet and studded with pickle relish, Russian dressing is on the spicier side, with a hint of heat from horseradish and hot sauce. For more information about salad dressings and tips on making them from scratch, see our Homemade Salad Dressing Primer.

Green Goddess Dressing is a perfect example of the magic of anchovies—they amplify and deepen the herbal flavors in this sauce without ever announcing their presence. For more recipes and tips, see our Homemade Salad Dressing Primer.

Lemon dressings often incorporate other flavors, such as herbs, garlic, and anchovy, but sometimes a simple lemon vinaigrette is all you want.

"Mock" Salad Dressing. Reduce proportions as appropriate.

Pistou, the simple combination of fresh basil, garlic, and olive oil, introduces the same savory spirit when tossed with tender, buttery green beans. One of the secrets to this salad is soaking the red onions: a quick water bath moderates their intensity without diminishing their crunch.

Arab salad, chopped salad, Israeli salad—whatever you choose to call it, there is no escaping it. Wherever you go, a Jerusalemite is most likely to have a plate of freshly chopped vegetables—tomato, cucumber, and onion, dressed with olive oil and lemon juice—served next to whatever else they are having. It's a local affliction, quite seriously. Friends visiting us in London always complain of feeling they ate "unhealthily" because there wasn't a fresh salad served with every meal. There are plenty of unique variations on the chopped salad but one of the most popular is fattoush, an Arab salad that uses grilled or fried leftover pita. Other possible additions include peppers, radishes, lettuce, chile, mint, parsley, cilantro, allspice, cinnamon, and sumac. Each cook, each fmily, each community has their own variation. A small bone of contention is the size of the dice. Some advocate the tiniest of pieces, only 1/8 inch / 3 mm wide, others like them coarser, up to 3/4 inch / 2 cm wide. The one thing that there is no arguing over is that the key lies in the quality of the vegetables. They must be fresh, ripe, and flavorsome, with many hours in the sun behind them. This fabulous salad is probably Sami's mother's creation; Sami can't recall anyone else in the neighborhood making it. She called it fattoush, which is only true to the extent that it includes chopped vegetables and bread. She added a kind of homemade buttermilk and didn't fry her bread, which makes it terribly comforting. Try to get small cucumbers for this as for any other fresh salad. They are worlds apart from the large ones we normally get in most supermarkets. You can skip the fermentation stage and use only buttermilk instead of the combination of milk and yogurt.

I love using baby carrots in assorted colors. Thumbelina carrots, which are little and stubby, are great for roasting. I use red, orange, yellow, and white carrots for the ribbons, which make this salad so vibrant. Even just the orange variety next to the green of the avocado and mizuna makes a beautiful and colorful salad. Toasting whole cumin seeds and then grinding them in a mortar and pestle or an electric spice grinder is essential for the great taste of this vinaigrette. If you don't have either way of grinding spices, you can substitute cumin powder. This salad rocks from the contrast between the soft texture and caramelized sweetness of the roasted carrots and their raw and crunchy counterparts.

Coby Ming, Harvest, Louisville, KY: "When I make vinaigrette, I always reach for Dijon. It's got the perfect balance of zip and bite and helps emulsify the dressing.

Mullen likes to spoon leftover vinaigrette over fish or grilled vegetables.