Saturday's Mouse: Basil Parmesan Salad Dressing

Yes, the title is salad dressing and the photo is salad. Or pasta. Pasta salad, really. Because you never want to look directly at salad dressing. It's like an eclipse. Or just ugly food. But it's delicious.

It's like basil pesto, in dressing form. You want that. Your salads want that.

I used my mini chopper, but you could do this in a food processor or a blender. If you're using a blender, cut everything up better than I did.

Basil.

Garlic.

Parmesan.

Equal parts oil and vinegar. I used olive oil and sherry vinegar, but red wine vinegar works as well.

Look, the rest of the world uses a different ratio. Michael Ruhlman says you want one part vinegar to three parts oil. Julia Child says you want one part vinegar to five parts oil. I'm just not on board with this. There's too much salad in my life to make it more than half oil. And I like vinegar. But make adjustments if this is too acidic. I will not subscribe to proper dressing techniques. This is delicious.

Add a dash of kosher salt and several dashes of pepper and give it a whirl.

A serious whirl, if your cheese and basil are as big as mine are. You want a chunky liquid in the end.

Pour that over a salad. I made a pasta salad. Actually, I had intended to use millet, because it's just sitting in my cabinet, wishing someone would eat it, but I forgot that you're supposed to soak that overnight, so I busted out the orzo. Put it on whatever salad you want. I made this one out of farmshare scraps:

Onions and yellow tomatoes.