Back To The TEFL Logue Kitchen: Soup Mixes And Salad Dressing

Summer is here, and summer is the season of salad, at least for me it is. As such, you can imagine the challenge of living in a country where the salad dressings on offer are lacking in variety, especially the low-fat versions. I can’t imagine that I am alone in this: lack of salad dressing options can be an issue almost anywhere.

It’s not a challenge to make the oil-and-vinegar stuff, as long as you get the right seasoning, but if you’re looking for a creamy, low-fat dressing, you’ve found the TEFL Logue post with the answer.

I like to make my dressing by mixing low-fat liquid plain yogurt with oregano (or some similar seasoning), parmesan cheese, salt, pepper, and just a little vinegar. If you can find the yogurt in a plastic bottle with a lit, and pour a little bit out, you’ve got a perfect container for mixing, pouring, and saving for tomorrow. My latest innovation, however, is to skip the separate seasonings, and just add a little of an appropriately flavored dry soup mix (broccoli, vegetable and garlic soup mixes get the thumbs up, chicken and other meat-flavor soups get the thumbs down).

But wait – there are even more uses for these seemingly boring soup mixes.

You can also use them – cooked with a little milk – as substitutes for more complicated and probably higher-fat cream sauces. Once or twice now I’ve combined broccoli soup mix with milk, stirred well, heated and then poured over cooked vegetables and pasta. I’m sure there are “real” ways of doing this, or you can simply by the sauce pre-made, but this is a quick, cheap and fairly low-fat way of producing something similar.

Finally, if you’re lucky enough to live in a place with the right kind of bread, you can make soup in a bread bowl by…following the directions for soup and pouring it into a bread shell. Yum.