Health & Wellness Investigations

A family member has a stellar  honey lime dressing recipe that uses mayonnaise, and - since I had a butt ton of lime and lots of fresh salad ingredients, I decided that I wanted to make it. One problem: I threw out my mayonnaise because traditional mayo is basically vegetable oil in a jar, mixed with a few egg yolks. And remember, I quit using vegetable oil. Now, yes, there are mayo brands that use olive oil, and if you really like to use mayo, you should totally buy some ! But I have, like, three recipes that call for mayo. In fact, the nearly full jar of mayo that I threw out for containing soybean oil was also over six months expired. Whoops. Sidebar: Just because it says it's made with olive oil doesn't mean it doesn't have vegetable oil - Hellman's Olive Oil Mayo and Kraft Olive Oil Mayo, for example, are still mostly soybean oil. Read your labels. My point is that I didn't buy the vegetable-oil-free mayo because I use mayo so seldom. But of co...

With all my talk about leaving out vegetable oils (canola, soybean, corn, etc), I thought I’d share an olive oil Italian dressing that is easy, inexpensive, and very convenient. Store-bought dressing usually use vegetable oil, and many home-made recipes get complex and/or use vegetable oil anyway, so I’m sharing mine! It uses the flavor of olive oil to make a great dressing, and – bonus – there’s absolutely no sugar . I will usually make enough to last 2-3 weeks at a time; you can scale the recipe to make as much or as little as you want. Basic Italian Dressing w/ Olive Oil ½ c. olive oil ½ c. white wine vinegar 1 tbsp Dijon mustard 1 tsp oregano Salt & Pepper to taste (I usually use quite a bit of pepper) [I usually just make the base dressing listed above, but sometimes I mix it up by adding one or more of the following] Optional: Scallions (minced)* Optional: 1 clove garlic, crushed Optional: ¼ c. Parmesan cheese Whisk all of the ingredients t...

I mentioned in my previous post that I stopped using vegetable oil , and gave a brief layman's overview of why. Now I'm going to lay out the substitutions I made in my own cooking, as well as some some suggestions for eating out and purchasing stuff at the grocery store. Practical Considerations - Cooking Changes: Salad Dressings: You can’t directly substitute another type of oil for vegetable oil in salad dressing, because other oils have flavors - vegetable oil does not. However, you can re-work your salad dressing recipes to accommodate other oils. I use a mixture of olive, walnut, and avocado oil in my dressings, and have occasionally used sesame or flaxseed oil as well. It may take some trial and error to convert your salad dressing recipes to non-vegetable oil, but it’s TOTALLY worth it...and I actually like a lot of my new recipes better than my original ones! Hint: start with more acid/vinegar and go from there Frying: Peanut oil - this works just as well...