Make your own salad dressing

Here's one of those old-fashioned thrifty ideas that feels new again. Instead of throwing away the last of the mustard or ketchup, dump a bit of vinegar in the bottom, shake it up, and put it back in the refrigerator to use as a base for homemade salad dressing. I thinned this ketchup with apple cider vinegar and later mixed it with mayonnaise and agave nectar (but anything sweet would have worked) for a creamy french dressing.



This would be a good time for me to promote my friend Alanna Kellogg's challenge: Never Buy Salad Dressing Again. Homemade salad dressing is not only economical, it's more natural (can you pronounce all the ingredients on a salad dressing bottle?) and greener (never have another salad dressing bottle to throw away or recycle again!).

The picture is my shutter speed experiment. At the relatively slow shutter speed of 1/125, the ketchup bottle blurred when I shook it in front of the camera. At the fast speed of 1/2500, the camera froze the movement so well that it looked like I was holding the bottle still in front of the camera.