Greek Salad Dressing

The electricity was off Wednesday morning when Mama left for work, and it stayed off for twenty-six hours. The pink notice had come two weeks before. Mama had paid what she could. The rest of what she owed got bigger the way numbers like that get bigger, and on Wednesday at six-thirty in the morning the lights blinked twice and the fridge sighed and stopped, and we had ourselves a day.

I went to school. I want to be clear about that. I do not skip school for the electricity being off. School is where nobody knows what’s happening at home, and I have decided that keeping it that way is part of my job, alongside dinner and the laundry and trying to get an algebra grade above a C-minus. I packed a sandwich in the dark from what was already in the cooler, caught the bus, sat through my five periods, and came home at three-thirty to a house that smelled cold. There is a smell a house has when the heat has been off for nine hours and the fridge has too. It is not a good smell. It is the smell of trying.

I want to tell you about the rest of that day because it is going to lead us to a recipe, eventually, the way most things in this notebook lead to a recipe eventually. I moved the milk and the eggs and the lunch meat from the dead fridge into a cooler I dragged out of the back of the closet, and I packed it with two bags of ice from the gas station on the corner. The ice cost me four dollars, which I had in my room because I had picked up the neighbors’ mail the weekend they were in Branson. I lit the four candles Mama keeps in the cabinet over the stove. I did homework by candlelight at the kitchen table, which is not romantic the way books make it sound. The light flickers in a way that makes you nauseous after twenty minutes. The wax smells get into your hair.

Mama got home at nine. I had cold sandwiches ready — lunch meat that needed to be eaten before it turned, the cheap kind of mayonnaise, lettuce that was wilting and got eaten anyway. We sat at the kitchen table by candlelight and ate. Mama looked at the candles and at the cooler and at me and she said thank you, baby, in a voice that did not have any energy left for emphasis but said the thing it needed to say. We ate sandwiches and we did not talk about the bill. We did not have to. The candles were on the table because of the bill. Words would have been redundant.

The lights came back on Thursday morning at eight-forty. I was sitting at the kitchen table with my chemistry book, and the lamp blinked and steadied, and the fridge sighed back on, and I let myself cry for about a minute and then I went to school. I do not let myself cry where Mama can see it. That is the rule. The rule is that she carries enough already, and my job is to not add to the pile.

I want to tell you about the recipe because the recipe came out of that day. Saturday I went grocery shopping with Mama at the Dollar General, and I picked up a bottle of red wine vinegar — eighty-nine cents, I had to argue for it, Mama said baby, what do we need that for, and I said just trust me, and she put it in the cart. We have olive oil. Mama buys the cheap kind in the big bottle, $4.99 at Walmart, and it lasts us four months. We have a lemon, the last one in the bag of three I bought week before last for ninety-nine cents. We have dried oregano in the spice rack, left over from Christmas when Aunt Tammy gave Mama a gift basket of seasonings she did not know what to do with. We have garlic. We have salt and pepper. We have everything. Every ingredient. In the house. Already.

I copied the recipe out of a recipe section in Family Circle last month at the dentist, the same trip where I tore out the chicken shawarma. Greek Salad Dressing, the page said. Olive oil, red wine vinegar, lemon juice, dried oregano, salt, pepper, garlic. That was the whole list. I read it twice. I read it three times. I sat in the waiting room and I felt my throat close up the way it does, and I tore that page out too and folded it into my pocket next to the shawarma, and I taped it into the front of my notebook the same night. This one I can do, I wrote underneath it, in pencil, because I needed to mark down which recipes were dreams and which ones were already mine.

I made it Sunday afternoon. Half a cup of olive oil. Three tablespoons of red wine vinegar. The juice of one lemon. A half-teaspoon of dried oregano, crumbled between my fingers the way the magazine said to. One clove of garlic, minced fine. A long pinch of salt and a few grinds of black pepper from the can on the counter that I’m not sure how old it is, honestly. I shook it all up in a jar with the lid on tight, the way I’ve seen Mama’s mama’s old recipes call for, and I left it on the counter while I made the salad — lettuce that was on its last day from Tuesday’s shopping, half a cucumber, three little tomatoes, a quarter of an onion, and a small handful of the mexican blend cheese because feta is not a thing I have ever bought and I am working with what I have.

I poured the dressing over the salad and I tossed it the way the magazine said to and I sat down at the kitchen table by myself and I took a bite. And I want to tell you something. I want to tell you that for the first time since I started cooking real meals in this house, I made a recipe from a magazine that turned out exactly the way the magazine said it would. The dressing tasted like the picture looked. The lemon and the oregano and the garlic and the vinegar all hit at once and made my mouth do that thing where it actually pays attention. It tasted, I am going to risk saying it, like a restaurant.

I sat at the kitchen table and ate the salad and I cried again, but it was a different kind of crying than the day before. It was the kind of crying you do when you find out you can do something you did not know you could do. Total cost of the dressing, with everything I already had, came out to thirty-seven cents. I checked the math twice. Thirty-seven cents for a jar of dressing that tastes like the kind of food the women in Family Circle magazine eat on purpose, with intention, in a kitchen that smells like spices.

I have it in the fridge in the same jar I shook it up in. It will last a week, the page says. I am going to use it on every salad I can scrape together until the lemon runs out, and then I am going to make another batch the week after, and I am going to do this every week from now on, because this is a thing I can do, and there are not many things I can do yet, and the ones I can are the ones I am holding on to.

I am going to give you the recipe exactly the way Family Circle printed it, because I want it to be honest, and because I want anybody who reads this and is also a fourteen-year-old in a kitchen they didn’t exactly choose to know that this one is for them. The whole list of ingredients is probably already in your kitchen. If it isn’t, the whole list will cost you under five dollars at any grocery store in America, and the bottle of dressing it makes will last you a week, and the seven dollars you would have spent on a bottle of grocery store Italian dressing stays in your pocket. Some recipes are gifts. This is one of them.

Prep Time: 10 min | Cook Time: N/A | Total Time: 10 min | Servings: 1

Ingredients

1 tablespoon fresh garlic minced fine (1-2 cloves)
1 tablespoon chopped fresh basil, or half that of dried
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon onion powder
1 tablespoon dried Mediterranean or Greek oregano leaves
1 teaspoon granulated sugar
1 teaspoon chopped fresh mint or half that of dried
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice (about half a lemon)
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
2 tablespoons water
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1 cup good quality Greek extra virgin olive oil (use Italian olive oil if you can’t find Greek)

Instructions

Combine the base. In blender, add all of the dressing ingredients in except oil.
Blend in the oil. Turn the blender on low speed, and very slowly add the olive oil in a drizzle until the entire cup of oil has been added.
Serve. Serve with our Greek Salad with Meat.

Nutrition (per serving)

Greek Salad Dressing — The First Recipe I Could Actually Afford to Make