Olive Oil Outage

In theory, the newest Veronica Foods olive oil store has just opened up in Stuyvesant Plaza, right around the corner from Chipotle, and a couple of doors down from Different Drummers Kitchen.

I mention this because I’m just about out of olive oil. Well, that’s not entirely true. I still have a reserve of very tasty lamb infused olive oil from my recent poaching project. That stuff is amazing spread on toast, and it’s even better on popcorn sprinkled with fennel pollen and sea salt.

My impossible goal is zero waste. I want to eat and drink everything in the house before we move to New Jersey. Albany Jane is hopefully going to help me by liberating the frozen turkey from the chest freezer, and if you can forgive the pun, that takes a real load off my chest.

Yes, replenishing the olive oil would be easy to do. But there’s another complicating factor.

Somehow I have a massive quantity of Lion and Globe peanut oil remaining. And I mean massive. Mostly because this winter Chinese-style stir fry fell out of favor in the Fussy household. So this bottle of flavorful high smoke point oil went left unloved on a shelf where it was long neglected.

There is also plenty of toasted sesame oil, roasted pumpkin seed oil, and some toasted delicata squash seed oil. I’m oil rich. Vinegars are also still well represented in the pantry.

The big problem struck just this week. Without olive oil, how will I dress my salad greens?

Let’s back up to my precious teenage years for a moment. After my parents got divorced a regular part of my weekly routine became Wednesday night dinners with my dad. I don’t know about him, but I remember really loving those evenings out. One fond memory is of a sushi restaurant in a mall that used to be called The Bakery Center. And there I particularly loved the ginger peanut salad dressing. The salad was merely a vehicle for this bright, nutty and vibrant sauce.

Emulsified salad dressings aren’t really my thing. But I figured it was worth a shot to recreate this simple pleasure from my youth. Especially since it solved both my current problems in one simple recipe.

Fortunately fresh garlic and ginger are two ingredients we always keep around the house. Actually, all of these turned out to be pantry staples.

.25 cup of rice vinegar
Large nub of ginger root (about 2T) – peeled & pressed
1 clove of garlic – peeled & pressed
2T natural salted peanut butter from TJs
1T Lloyd Spear’s buckwheat honey
1t sugar
.5t toasted sesame oil
.5 cup of peanut oil

To make this you simply whisk the first seven ingredients together, and then slowly whisk in the peanut oil. Easy peasy. And wow, did that take me back. Maybe it wasn’t the exact flavor profile of the stuff from my youth. But it was close enough. In the future I might kick up the peanut butter a notch and see how that goes, but this experiment was a great success.

Still, I don’t think it’s physically possible to eat enough salad to empty out the jug of peanut oil in the next few weeks. But I just might start using it to pop popcorn. Maybe if I get desperate I can find some lye and learn how to make soap.

Kidding.
Mostly.