Be Honest: You Hate Your Lunch Salad — But You Don’t Have To

I’m not a strictly DIY person — there’s a place in all of our lives for store-bought peanut butter and yogurt and bread and many other delicious things. But I do believe there’s a time in your life to leave the comfort of the premade bottled salad dressings and start to live in a make-your-own-salad-dressing universe. They taste better. They offer you a modicum of control over the world and a kind of authorship of the (vegetable-based) events in your life.

But I also know that the road gets lonely and dark sometimes; you feel like you just can’t shake up another empty Grey Poupon jar of your signature mustard vinaigrette, and you need options. Here I am, at the onset of short days and shrinking farmers' markets, to say: Stay the course. Make your own.

Here are seven easy-peasy, make-at-home salad dressings from Lucky Peach's new cookbook, Power Vegetables! — to expand your repertoire and keep you away from the bottle.