Salad Dressing

Our kitchen sink clogged spontaneously sometime about two weeks ago; it was fine, and then I went to wash the rice cooker and it just wouldn't drain.  My husband tried snaking it with the little pipe snake he'd found in the basement, poured boiling water down it, and so forth, without much effect.  So tonight my father-in-law (a plumber) came over with his truck of plumbing tools to see what was going on with it, after supper.

I had planned on making lasagna, Italian bread (in the bread machine), cake, and a salad, but when I got to the point of making the salad, I realized I hadn't gotten myself any salad dressing.  (That should tell you just how often I eat salad.  Ahem.)  I hit up my usual recipe source (Foodgawker), but I just wasn't finding anything that I wanted to try.  So after estimating oil/vinegar ratios from all the recipes I'd been looking at, I made something up.  It went something like this:

• 1/3 cup red wine vinegar
• 1/2 cup canola oil
• ~1/2 tsp. sugar
• ~1/4 tsp. salt
• ~1/2 tsp. basil
• ~1/2 tsp. oregano
• ~1/2 tsp. taragon
• ~1/4 tsp. ground mustard

It was surprisingly not bad, given that I just threw a bunch of stuff into oil and vinegar.  It ended up looking like this (prior to shaking):

The cake was a chocolate mayonnaise cake, with vanilla frosting.  I often have trouble with frosting textures, but I added more milk this time, so it wasn't as stiff as it usually is.

The bread was just the Italian herb bread in my bread machine book - normal white bread with oregano, basil, and parmesan added in.

The sink apparently had just slowly gotten clogged over the years, and the professional pipe snake handled it just fine - they snaked all 14 feet to the sewer line, and it works again!