Condiments, Dips & Sauces Recipes

Good Ingredients
A dish is always a product of its ingredients. When creating a dish from a small number of ingredients, this adage rings especially true. In salads, the ingredients really shine, so, when you can, spend more for top quality vinegars and oils. Think about it: you only use tablespoons of oil and vinegar to dress a salad. What seems like…


Salsa Verde, Italian Style
Salsa verde is extremely simple to make. The end result is a sauce with a distinctly flavorful punch. This example of an Italian green sauce is but one of many versions. Green sauces can be found in cuisines around the world: Italian pesto, Indian cilantro mint chutney, Mexican salsa verde…the list goes on.

Simple, Delicious Strawberry Sauce
The taste of this simple sauce of slightly sweetened, fresh strawberries transports me back to my childhood summers. In my memories, the berries are just picked and still sandy, the air is warm and humid, and my friends and I are barefoot and laughing. Ah summer!

Simple Dipping Sauce for Artichokes
Here’s a suggestion for an easy dipping sauce to enjoy with your artichoke. Years ago, a chef friend remarked that soy sauce and butter was one of his favorite flavor combinations. That comment inspired me to add soy sauce to my earlier dip that I made for artichokes: melted butter with fresh lemon juice. I…

How to Make a Basic Vinaigrette
A basic vinaigrette is an oil and vinegar dressing for salads. Above is a photo of just some of the ingredients from my pantry and fridge that I have on hand to make vinaigrette salad dressings. The possible flavor variations are endless.

Cilantro Mint Chutney
Spring is so exciting for me. One of the first things to sprout up in my garden every year is mint: such a fresh and beautiful green and wonderfully fragrant. It’s so lovely and green I just had to make something with it. So I got out one of my favorite recipes: cilantro mint chutney….

Easy Cranberry Sauce
Another Thanksgiving favorite of mine is cranberry sauce. I’ve loved it since childhood. However, I have to admit that what I loved in childhood was the canned, jellied kind, which seemed almost magical. My mom would open both ends of the can and then push it out one end. There it would sit on the serving…

Thanksgiving Gravy
This is it: turkey day is approaching. Plenty of cooks who manage very well all year panic when Thanksgiving approaches. How do you cook the perfect turkey? What is stuffing, anyway? Yikes, gravy! How do you make that? I’ve received a request from my sister-in-law DD to help her and the many other anxious cooks out there. So,…