I was making all the food for a women’s tea on Saturday, and we were having the company for Sunday dinner that we should have had the week before, only we were snowed in, so I needed something simple. Fortunately, that was what I had already planned anyway. No multi-step recipes, no fancy dessert. I wanted to make something we’d had before, a salmon dish with some kind of sauce made with cider and cream. But when I went online to look for it I couldn’t find anything that sounded right. At some point I re-stumbled upon the recipe which turned out to be in Molly Wizenberg’s
sauce
Debi’s Great Green Stuff
I got the original recipe for this dip/sauce/dressing from a monster cooking blog called Pinch of Yum, where it was called “5-Minute Magic Green Sauce.” It is totally great, but let me say that this isn’t really a 5-minute recipe, with all due respect where respect is due. It takes more time than that just to strip the leaves off enough cilantro/parsley to make a packed cup. (You can pack an almost infinite amount of small leaves into a cup.) However, it is well worth making. People scarfed this down at a reception like you wouldn’t believe, and then stood around the bowl forlornly scraping out the last molecules with pita chips. I should have made at least a double recipe. It’s really a combination of a type of pesto (the herb/oil/nut component) and guacamole (the avocado/jalapeno/lime component). Lindsay Ostrom, the author, says it can be used as a dip, spread or salad dressing depending on how thin you make it. It could work on a very sturdy salad with lots of crunchy ingredients and would be good on any kind of meat or fish as a sauce (my son tasted it and said, “This would be really good with beef”), with any raw vegetable as a dip, or with some type of neutral-flavored chip or cracker.