Eating a salad a day is great for your health! Here is a great ranch salad dressing recipe to help you get a delicious flavor boost to your salad.

1/2 cup mayonnaise
1/3 cup milk
1 tsp lemon juice
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
dash garlic powder
dash onion powder
dash thyme

Mix all ingredients together - you can adjust the onion and garlic to your particular taste.

Perfect for topping a salad, dipping celery and carrot sticks into, and for many other reasons!

The milk gives you 3.8g of carbs (less if you use a low carb milk). The mayo is under .5g for pretty much any mayo you find, and everything else is pretty much zero carb. This means you can keep the total carbs for your entire salad very low!

If you are in induction and need to stay super low on your carb counts, I suggest going with oil and vinegar, plus a few herbs. That's zero carb and very tasty. But to keep a variety of salad flavors in your diet, or if you're past induction and don't mind an extra 4g in your daily intake, I definitely recommend ranch. It adds a great flavor. Plus, it's hard to dip your celery sticks into oil-and-vinegar :)

Origins of Ranch Dressing

Amazing as it might seem, even though ranch dressing is the second most popular dressing in the US (behind Italian dressing), it is a fairly recent invention - at least if you believe the makers of Hidden Valley Ranch. They claim that all roots of the ranch style dressing began with them in 1954. They had an actual ranch in California and served this type of dressing that everybody loved. Of course, they spotted a gold mine and began selling it.

It was only 1983 when they created a version that could be sold unrefrigerated - instead of a packet mix that you made at home with your own buttermilk or milk!!

I'm still convinced that a buttermilk based dressing must have been used elsewhere in the world. Buttermilk is an extremely common and natural product. It is in fact the "milk" left in the bottom of a butter churner, which was often drunk and enjoyed.

Still, whatever its origins, it makes a tasty dressing and dip!



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