I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, we always had salad with dinner. And our favorite dressing was Good Seasons Italian Salad Dressing. It was so fun to make and it tasted great.

So recently, I bought a couple of the cruets and of course they came with 2 packages of the dressing each.

I decided to try the dressing to see if it still tastes as good as I remember. I didn't look at the ingredients or the nutrition statement before I tried it.

It was sooooo sweet! I couldn't get over it. I used to love the stuff, but now it tastes almost like candy to me. Yuck! I threw out the three packets I had left.

So I checked the nutrition statement and the ingredients (first ingredient is sugar of course) and it has too many carbs per serving for my peace of mind (as of this writing I forget what it was).

But not to be undone, I decided to surf the net for a clone and I found one. And of course, one of its largest ingredients is sugar. Well I modified it, took out the sugar, and I am so pleased with the result, which tastes the way I remember Good Seasons Italian Salad Dressing tasted like when I was a kid, that I'm posting it here:

1/4 teaspoon dried carrot (instructions to follow)
1/4 teaspoon dried red bell pepper
1 teaspoon lemon pepper (I use McCormick lemon pepper with garlic and onion, it doesn't have sugar in it, just make sure whatever one you use has lemon juice solids in it pretty high up on the list)
1/8 teaspoon dried parsley flakes, well crumbled
1 teaspoon salt (or to taste)
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1/8 teaspoon onion powder
2 teaspoons dry, unsweetened pectin
1 pinch ground oregano

This makes enough for one bottle of dressing. Of course you can make up a bunch of it, in which case, you want to measure out about 5 teaspoons for a bottle. The pectin is about 1/3 gram of carbohydrate per teaspoon, so it adds a negligible amount. What it does for the dressing is thicken it up a little and keep it from separating so fast.

To make the dried carrot and red bell pepper:

Grate and mince a couple carrots and a bell pepper into very small pieces, don't mix them together. Spread them out thin on a baking pan and dry in the oven set to 250 degrees for 45 to 60 minutes, or until all of the pieces are completely dry but not browned. Store the excess in an airtight container. You can also dry them in your dehydrator by putting them on parchment or plastic wrap.

Let me know how you like it,
;-Deb