FORKIN’ GOOD DRESSING
Kate Fenwick explains why DIY might just save your fridge – and the planet.
Simon and Kate on the set of their podcast, Forkin' Good.
If you’d told me last year that co-hosting a podcast with celebrity chef Simon Gault would turn me into a homemade salad dressing evangelist, I would have laughed and pointed to the 14 half-used condiments permanently living in my fridge door. Yet here we are.
The Forkin’ Good Podcast, for me, was meant to be about mainstreaming waste education, but it has also become my unofficial weekly cooking lesson, complete with gourmet wisdom and the occasional joke aimed at my "creative" kitchen habits.
One of Simon’s greatest gifts so far is teaching me the world’s simplest, most versatile salad dressing: 1 tsp creamy mustard, 3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil and any amount of balsamic vinegar you like. Whisk it. Then pretend you’re a culinary genius. It tastes incredible.
More importantly, it solves a huge part of the waste problem sitting in your fridge. New Zealand households throw away over 100,000 tonnes of food waste every year, much of it because we overbuy, underuse and forget what is lurking in the back of the fridge. Add to that the estimated 1.76 billion single-use plastic containers we send to landfill annually, and suddenly that innocent-looking bottle of sesame-lime dressing becomes part of a much bigger issue.
Store-bought dressings are classic "use once, abandon forever" items. You try a new flavour, use two tablespoons, then it becomes a long-term fridge tenant until the expiry date finally forces you to confront your choices. That is food waste and plastic waste in one sad bottle.
Making your own dressing means: using ingredients you already have, so there is less waste and fewer forgotten bottles; avoiding preservatives and fillers, which is better for you and better for the planet; cutting back on plastic, because you can reuse the same jar over and over; and actually finishing what you make (wild concept, I know). And the best part is that you become more connected to your food again.
It is a tiny step back toward the DIY kitchen culture our grandparents lived by, where food was simple and nothing went to waste because resources were respected. That is the heart of the Forkin’ Good Podcast: learning simple shifts and rediscovering the joy of doing things yourself.
So tune in if you want practical tips and the occasional roasting of my cooking skills. We are pretty much on every platform you can find, including YouTube if you want to actually see what we are up to. Your fridge, and the planet, will thank you.
