Raspberry Salad Dressing

Some months ago, I received a gift of about five glasses of home made raspberry preserves. It's good stuff and works with anything, like peanut butter, and raspberry preserve sandwiches, and on waffles, or to sweeten a cup of green tea. One got lost in the pantry, and I just found it. I've been playing around with salad dressings lately, so I started formulating a raspberry dressing recipe. Here's what I came up with.


1 tablespoon raspberry preserves
1 tablespoon vinegar
3tablespoons olive oil
1 half teaspoon salt
1 half teaspoon fresh ground black pepper corns

Put it all in a bowl, and whisk.

Because I believe in playing around with recipes, I modified this one in several different ways. You add and subtract ingredients according to your taste. Here is some of my variations.

1.I added another tablespoon of raspberry preserves, which made it a little sweeter.
2.Added a tablespoon of Dijon mustard, which added the flavor of the mustard, and made the dressing thick, and creamy.
3.I also tried it with lemon instead of vinegar.
4.You can even use another kind of preserves, or jelly
5.If you substitute honey, instead of the preserves, and add the dijon, than you have honey mustard.

It was good to me every way I tried it. This dressing has lots of flavor, which means it doesn't take much to dress your salad. After all olive oil has as many calories as any other oil, if that matters to you.

About knives

So I've been hammering over how to start this blog for a long time now, and I think the problem has been me, trying to come up with something deep, and meaningful. Well it looks like I'm just not that deep, and a lot of what I think is meaningful, many others think is what the bull do, so I have decided to just write about whatever pops into my mind. I anticipate the need for a fair amount of self censorship using that method, but I'm OK with that, and you, dear reader will be all the better for it, trust me.

So what am I thinking about right now? Knives. I own quite a few of them, you know. Take these Hinkle's, for instance. These are my very first really nice kitchen knives. What's so nice about them? Before I discovered that this kind of knife existed, all I knew as kitchen knives were very cheep light weight affairs from which the handles would eventually come loose, and they couldn't hold an edge for longer than a week. I remember a lot of these coming through my mothers kitchen, back in the fifties, and early sixties, but at the time it just was the, way it was, and who knew it could be any different. They didn't sell French chefs knives at Woolworth's. The things we bought were cheap and disposable, but at the time I really didn't care. I wasn't even doing the cooking. I didn't do any real cooking until the mid eighties, and that's when pots with loose handles, and dull knives started to bug me. As an avid fan of Julia Child, even before I started cooking, and subsequently all the cooking shows that came after her, I started noticing these great looking knives called French Chefs knives, but just didn't see any in regular retail stores, or maybe they were there and I just hadn't noticed.

Finally, some time in the early nineties, I spotted one at a now defunct department store in central New York. It was an eight inch, Hinkle Four Star, and was on sale for little under seventy dollars. I did a little research on the name and found out that Hinkle was considered a manufacturer of quality products, and the Four Star model was one of their top line models, and that the sale price was a very good price indeed. So I rushed back to that store and bought it. I was a proud owner of a Hinkle.

My enthusiasm caused me to boast about it to friends, all of whom just didn't get it. "Why is he showing me this knife, and grinning like that? Always thought he was a little weird." Not long after, I found the Hinkle bread knife, at an equally good price, and bought that also. I have used the chefs knife almost every day now for almost twenty years, and the bread knife gets a workout too. Now it is said by many that one doesn't really need but two good knives, a chefs knife and a bread knife, and I agree, but over time I began to see good chef knives all over the place, Target, Walmart, K mart. I'm thinking the popularity of the Food Network had something to do with increased demand. Just a couple years ago I found a set of Chicago Cutlery knives consisting of an eight inch French Chefs knife and a paring knife. This set was selling for under ten dollars at Kohl's. They looked very substantial, and had all the things one is supposed to look for in a good knife, forged blade, bolster, full tang, and the whole thing held together with three serious looking rivets. It didn't look like something that would fall apart any time soon. Of course I bought it. I start using the chefs knife, and looking to find something wrong with it. It's a little heaver than the Hinkle, but it feels good in the hand, and it keeps a very good edge. It's only been lightly sharpened twice in three years. I just use the steal on it before each use. As far as function, it's every bit as good as the Hinkle. I use the paring knife very little. The advantage of having at least two good chef knives is, one can be used for meat, and the other for fruit, and veggies, when cooking.

Have you discovered Marshall's, and TJ Maxx? These stores carry brand name products at, from twenty to fifty percent off, according to their web site. They have clothing for men, women and children, furniture, home accessories and, kitchenware. Marshall's is where I came upon a Calphalon santoku knife with a beautiful handle, for only fourteen dollars. At that price I figured I could buy a knife, just because it was pretty. Turns out it's a great knife for cutting very thin slices off of a ham or roast. A few weeks later I found the matching utility knife at the same store, of course I bought that too. I forgot how much I paid for it, but you can bet it wasn't much.

My latest is a little Farberware utility knife that cost no more than a couple dollars, at Wal-Mart.
If you feel the kitchen geek in you coming out, you will need a good knife, or two. You can spend a couple hundred dollars for one if you can afford it, but if function, and frugality is the name of the game for you, don't despair. As I have shown an excellent knife can be had, without having to decide that college education for the kids ain't all it's cracked up to be. So there you have it, why a guy who only needs two good knives has seven. Don't judge me! Anyway, that's what's cook'n today.