Healthy Café Rio Style Dressing

I almost kissed myself today when I threw this recipe together in hopes of making something that tasted like Café Rio’s house dressing and ended up loving it. That’s right, it was awesome! And HEALTHY!! I doubted that it could be made because it’s sometimes hard to replicate the taste of things like MSG, and a lot of time healthy food is good for healthy food but could never live up to the taste of “other” food. But it WAS good, and not just good as far as healthy foods go, but good in general. I feel this is my greatest contribution to humanity yet. My boys ate it with their fingers. We are big salad eaters around here because my children love it. And Café Rio is one of our favorite places because, well, we like delicious food. But with our new lifestyle, we can’t eat it as often as our palates might like us to, so a healthy version had to be made.

Originally, I found an avocado cilantro dressing that I tried, but it needed more oomph. I wanted it to taste like Café Rio’s dressing. I searched far and wide for a healthy Café Rio dressing but all of them called for buttermilk or mayonnaise and ranch packets. Well, ranch packets don’t fit into my new lifestyle because they have MSG in them, so I couldn’t do that. I thought about making my own ranch and combining it with other ingredients to have the Café Rio taste to it. So I came up with this today after browsing a bunch of different recipes to determine what I needed to get the taste I wanted. I am happy about this. Eating healthy makes me happy, and I have been excited about the challenge of converting recipes into their healthy form. I seriously wake up itching to get in the kitchen and discover a healthy version of my favorite recipes. I hope you enjoy this!

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Creamy Avocado Tomatillo Dressing

Ingredients:

• 1 large avocado
• 1/2 cup nonfat plain Greek yogurt
• 1 cup coconut milk (or any milk you choose, but keep it healthy, Coconut milk is a bit thicker.)
• 1/4-1/2 bunch of cilantro
• 1/2 jalapeño (or more if you like it hot – I usually taste my jalapeño first to see how hot it is)
• 2 cloves garlic
• juice of 1 small lime
• 1/2 tsp onion powder (Add more if you want, I never measure so I just do to taste)
• 1/2 tsp garlic powder (Again, you may need to add more)
• 1-2 tomatillos
• 1/2 tsp parsley
• sea salt to taste

Directions

1. Throw all of your ingredients into a blender (peel and pit the avocado, of course) or food processor, and mix until well blended. Add more lime or sea salt as needed. Makes about 2 cups!

We like to serve it with salad on homemade whole wheat tortillas. Yum.