Tomato Dressing | Inspired Living

Here is how you make a super delicious salad with a great tasting dressing without turning your salad into a junk food.

Why Most Salads are Junk-Food

Junk food is usually food that contains so called “empty calories”. These are calories that come without the nutrients. How do you get them? You get them by making re-fined foods. By extracting only a small part of the original product and discarding all the naturally occurring nutrients. Oil is a perfect example. You discard pretty much everything and only leave the fat. 100% of the calories in oils come from fat.

How can a fresh salad be turned into a junk-food? Easily. Take for instance a head of romain lettuce. It weighs about 300 g. That is a rather large volume. Most would see a salad made out of romain lettuce as a large salad. Now let us imagine that you add 1 teaspoon of oil to it, as dressing. All of a sudden you have a meal where 50% of the calories come from fat! This is now a junk-food.

1 teaspoon of oil is not that much. Most would add more than a tablespoon. If you were to add a tablespoon of oil, to the lettuce, you would create a meal where 75% of the calories come from fat! What is that? A super junk-food?

Dressings are usually what carries the salad. But you do not want to turn your salad into a junk-food. Here is my all time favorite salad dressing recipe, that keeps your salad a healthy salad.

Tomato Dressing Recipe

In the picture you see the happy ingredients of this salad dressing. They are:

2 regular tomatoes (or 3 small ones)

1/2 lemon without peel (mayer lemon if you have)

6 green, de-pitted olives

3 large, soft, de-pitted dates

The ingredients are then mixed in a blender. The tomatoes give a nice base. The olives give a salty taste. The lemon gives a little acid taste and the dates give a wonderful sweetness. In the picture you see what the dressing will look like when finished.

This dressing is so good that you may be tempted to just have it on its own! But the great thing is, that you can. It is not made out of fat, toxic, dehydrating or stimulating substances like normal dressings. Regular dressings have lots of fat, salt and some vinegar (diluted acetic acid) and maybe some other additions. You would not be be able to have a meal made out of a regular dressing. This dressing, on the other hand, you actually could have as a meal. But you may want a salad as well. Here is how I make a salad that goes with the dressing.