A Simple Side Salad with Perfect Creamy Mustard Dressing

If this creamy mustard dressing was an outfit it would be a little black dress, since it goes well with just about everything. I’ve put it on side salads galore. It mellows out peppery radishes or bowls full of radicchio, and it lends a hand to sweet baby tomatoes. It makes my mouth water for any bowl full of fresh veggies.

Recipe inspiration and a story about celeriac

I’ve been making my way through David Lebovitz’s cookbook, My Paris Kitchen, where he makes quite a few dishes with celery root, also known as celeriac. As if sounding like “celiac disease” wasn’t bad enough, celeriac is also visually unappetizing, a big hairy ball filled with knobby roots at one end. Almost a decade ago, I tried “mashed celeriac” which was advertised as “good for diabetics” and unwelcome even at that forward-thinking Thanksgiving table.

But when I read about celery root in My Paris Kitchen, I forgot it was the same thing as “celeriac” and gave it a try. I made it cubed and roasted, which turned out great! It was a bit softer than a potato and had a pleasant celery aroma. It tasted kind of like roasted turnips except much easier on the digestion (if you know, you know). A true win! Truth be told, I never ended up making the cookbook’s “celery root salad with mustard sauce,” since it would take me too long to julienne the whole bowling ball of celery root into fine slivers. BUT, I did come around on celeriac rebranded as “celery root,” and I’ve used the dressing for this salad on pretty much everything else.

Simple Side Salad Recipe

Recently, I’ve been persuading my mom to eat more cooked vegetables, since she’s on the salad-as-only-source-of-vegetables diet. I know, I know, salads are great, but at the expense of cooked veggies? I think she’s really missing out!

So the other day, she intercepted my soapbox speech about steamed vegetables to give me her own soapbox speech about salads: “Look at all the veggies on salads: lettuce, peppers, tomatoes, onions…..”

I laughed at the time: “Who doesn’t know what goes on a salad?” But later I realized she’d given me the perfect recipe. It was the one I’d seen my mom make day after day my whole life. It was almost exactly the same as the recipe my great grandmother made each day in the summer, picking lettuce, tomatoes, and green beans fresh from her backyard garden. And the ingredient list goes like this:

• Whatever you have on hand.

Pretty simple, huh? And this is exactly what I try to replicate when I make side salads today.

Don’t these greens look pretty? I’ve written recently about the cut-and-come-again mesclun greens in my garden and why I love them. I recently used them to make sweet potatoes topped with pesto, and today I made this salad using them, too. No need to go out and buy anything special. Following my mom’s recipe, feel free to use spring mix, arugula, romaine, or whatever lettuce you have on hand! 🙂

Simple side salad ingredients (today’s version)

• mesclun salad greens
• chopped fresh dill
• halved cherry tomatoes
• sliced radishes
• diced orange pepper
• diced onion

That’s it! What do you have on hand for your side salad today?

How to make perfect creamy mustard dressing

Whisk all of these ingredients into a bowl:

• ¼ cup mayonnaise
• 2 tablespoons crème fraîche
• 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
• 1 tablespoon stone-ground mustard
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• ½ teaspoon salt

These ingredients make for a perfect, tangy base sauce. This time, I chose to add some extra black pepper, too. Next time, when I don’t already have dill added to the salad, I might add some dried dill to this as well. Celery seed might even be nice–the possibilities are endless.

My favorite part? No anchovies, no making garlic paste, no chopping, and no having to use a blender.

This makes enough for two generous side salads. Double it for a crowd of four.

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