For probably 10 years or more, I wouldn’t buy the salads in bags because, even though it probably doesn’t happen as often as it seems, when there’s a product recall, it seems to be salads in a bag. Lately, maybe over the last month, we started buying salads in a bag again. Every time we ate one, I thought to myself . . I hope this is safe.
They’re so easy! Open a bag of greens, open a bag of dressing, open whatever other bags are in the kit, stir and eat. I really do not like making salads. I need to get back to making about five days of them at once, vacuum sealing them in jars. That works so well for us.
Part of our Christmas meal plan was salads. I was going to use two kits to make Caesar Salad because that’s the only salad Chad will eat. Vince loves the one with dried cranberries in it so I was going to use two bags of that and there would be two salads on the table.
I ordered the Caesar salad kits from Walmart about a week ago. That same day, Vince went to Aldi and got six salad kits. The very next day, I heard about a recall because of a potential for listeria. I told Vince – don’t open any of those bags of salad . . I’ll check to see if they’re ok.
Yesterday as I was getting everything prepped for today’s meal, I checked the salads. The ones from Walmart, as well as the ones from Aldi were all on the recall list. Dang it!
We had two packages of Romaine in the fridge so I thought . . I’ll just make our own Caesar salads. I doubted I had any Caesar dressing in the house so I used this recipe and made our own dressing. It was so simple to make. I didn’t have anchovy paste but we always have anchovies in the house. I smashed up two anchovies with a fork, stirred in a little of the “anchovy juice”, didn’t even measure the rest of the ingredients – just eyeballed it. The salads are so easy to make – lettuce, grated parmesan cheese, black pepper . . the dressing was so easy. I asked Vince if he thought our salad today was as good as the bagged salad. He said “Yours was SO much better!). That’s it . . No more storebought, bagged salads for me . . ever!
montanaclarks says
I too make most of our salad dressings. Mike loves Caesar and I found it hard to make a dressing that would taste as good as the ones we get in restaurants. So, he would eat the Litehouse brand and was happy with it and I would make my oil based dressing. This summer our friends from Bend, Oregon introduced us to Toby’s brand of salad dressing. Made in Bend, OR, small batch, no preservatives or things on the label I don’t even know what are. You can buy it at Sprouts in Arizona. Their blue cheese and their ranch is to die for–so, so good!! I am going to try your Caesar dressing too.
judy.blog@gmail.com says
Not sure it’s available here but I’ll start watching for it. Thanks!
Cindy F says
I don’t know what it is about salads but I really don’t like making them. I loved the bagged salads and these days I’m stuck on the Sesame Asian from Dole. There was a recall but it didn’t affect what was sold here so I’m good. I made a similar Caesar salad for my husband’s birthday recently but used a coddled egg instead of the mayo. I used to be able to buy pasteurized eggs but I haven’t seen them in a very long time.