Ina Garten’s Homemade Blue Cheese Dressing Turns Any Summer Veggie Into a Star Salad

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There’s a lot we love about summer cooking, from the smell of burgers and barbecued chicken sizzling on the grill to the thrill of making homemade ice cream for dessert. But everyone knows that the best part of summer cooking is that the produce is top notch. From ripe, juicy tomatoes to crisp, fresh lettuce and crunchy cucumbers, it’s a joy to add more veggies to our diet this time of year. So how can you elevate summer’s fresh bounty so it’s actually worthy of dinner status? Leave it to Ina Garten, author of Modern Comfort Food, to have the answer. To give her summer vegetables the star treatment, she whips up something creamy, cheesy, and rich: a homemade blue cheese dressing that turns any summer veggie into a meal worth celebrating.

Creating summer salads can feel a little daunting, especially if you’re used to seeing the colorful bowls full of seemingly dozens of different ingredients that pop up so often on TikTok. Sure, they look great, but we want to spend most of our time enjoying the sunshine, not cooped up in the kitchen chopping endless heaps of veggies and toasting nuts.

That’s why Ina Garten’s homemade blue cheese dressing is such a summer staple. You can whip up a batch, then use it to dress any kind of raw veggie you want. Garten pairs her dressing with a simple salad of fresh green lettuce and heirloom tomatoes. When the ingredients this time of year are so delicious, things don’t need to be complicated. You can add anything you’d like to the salad — cucumbers, fresh corn, sliced peppers, minced parsley, roasted beets — and they’ll all be enhanced by Garten’s creamy dressing.

Thankfully, the homemade blue cheese dressing recipe is simple to make, with a food processor doing most of the work (though you could also just use a whisk or a spoon if you don’t feel like lugging yours onto the countertop). Garten adds Roquefort cheese, mayonnaise, heavy cream, vinegar, salt, and pepper, then whirs the food processor until the ingredients are blended but the cheese is still chunky. Still craving more cheese flavor? Garten tops her salad with crumbles of Roquefort to make sure its unique flavor shines through.

There’s just something about the pairing of the cool, creamy, tangy blue cheese dressing with the fresh vegetables that’s irresistible. Not in the mood for salad? You can pair the blue cheese dressing with crudité as well, and it’s delicious as a burger topper too. Make up a batch of Ina Garten’s homemade blue cheese dressing, and you’ll be snacking on veggies all summer.

In search of more summer recipes? Giada De Laurentiis has plenty:

Watch: How to Make Watermelon Mango Salsa