Lemon Balm Vinaigrette

This may sound a bit off, but generally, I like to put up (preserve) everything that we harvest during the summer months and buy what we need locally. This is because food is cheap in the summer and we don't produce enough food to feed us year-round (yet!). During the winter months, when food is more expensive, I like to pull from our stash.

With that being said.......well, we needed room in our freezer.

So out came, some zucchini and squash to make zucchini relish (yummy!) and squash and onion relish (salty). All of this is from the garden.

More zucchini for some delicious zucchini bread with chocolate chips added.

And we used some of our salsa stash to make salsa chicken.  This was very good. We used our Cherokee Purple Salsa and chicken breasts. Sorry, I didn't get a picture after it was plated.

But, I have two rather large lemon balm bushes in my herb garden and I wanted to find a use for them. I found a few recipes worth trying ..... first up was Lemon Balm Vinaigrette.

Start with all the ingredients needed. I used my herb cutting scissors (with green handle) to 'chop' up  the lemon balm.

I quadrupled the recipe and I actually left out all of the olive oil just because I didn't want to add those calories. It tasted great to me. You definitely need to like the taste of lemon because it has that lemony flavor. I also enjoy adding a fruity taste to my salads, so this is perfect for me. You could also process the food more to make it more liquid and less chunky, but if its going on a salad, then the chunks shouldn't matter much.

Update: I had some of this on my salad and I think it was too lemony. It was a refreshing splash for my salad, but the lemon was strong enough for me to *almost* make the lemon face. So if I make this again, I would hold out some of the lemon juice, or I would try this recipe instead.