Catalina Dressing
I recently bought a couple bottles of regular ranch dressing because they were super cheap. Monte prefers lite or fat-free, so when he grumbled about me having bought regular, I said I’d make a homemade dressing for him instead. (Gem can eat the ranch. She uses it for chicken nuggets and fries. 😉)
I already had a recipe in mind: the Catalina dressing my mom used to make when I was a kid. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find Mom’s recipe. I don’t even remember if she had it written down or if it was in one of her cookbooks. (I checked her Better Homes & Gardens cookbook and didn’t find it there.) All I remembered was it included these three ingredients: sugar, ketchup, and celery seed.
So I found a similar recipe on AllRecipes.com and set to experimenting. It took only two tries to get it right. 😊
The original AllRecipes version called for paprika and onion powder, neither of which I have, so I immediately deleted those from my first attempt. I also swapped out the celery flakes for celery seed, since that’s what Mom used. I didn’t have red wine vinegar so I substituted rice vinegar and added a tablespoon of my brother’s home-bottled cherry wine. 😉
I kept the remaining ingredients: sugar, canola oil, ketchup, and Italian seasoning.
The first go-round tasted pretty good, though I didn’t like the Italian seasoning in it at all. Mom’s version definitely hadn’t included that. Hers was also a mite thicker and sweeter than what I’d mixed up.
We finished off that batch in record time, so when I mixed up the next version I omitted the Italian seasoning and cut the vinegar in half (but still kept the cherry wine.)
This time it was perfect! It tasted just like I remembered. I know it still isn’t exactly how Mom made it, because she would’ve used cider vinegar (or maybe white vinegar) and corn oil instead of canola. I doubt she put paprika in hers, and certainly not onion powder because I don’t recall her ever having that in her spice collection. So even if I buy those spices, I won’t use them in this recipe. One thing I know she never used was wine, since she was a teetotaler! 😄
Now I’m excited to eat salads again. I love this dressing so much I could practically drink it straight! 😄 It also tastes (almost) as good substituting Stevia sweetener for the sugar.
Catalina Dressing
Ingredients
- ½ cup sugar or artificial sweetener, such as Stevia
- ¼ cup rice vinegar or white vinegar
- ½ cup canola or olive oil
- ¼ cup ketchup
- ½ tsp dried celery seed
- 1 tbl red wine (optional)
Directions
- Combine all ingredients in a lidded jar/shaker or in a blender. Shake or blend until well mixed. Or do what my Mom did: use a mixer to beat the ingredients together. Store in refrigerator.
