College Catalina Salad

Today is Charlie's (my friend and designer extraordinaire for A Food Year) birthday and I meant to make homemade crackers and cheese in honor of it (call it an inside joke, I suppose), but since I do not have the internet I cannot find good cracker recipes. I don't even know a bad cracker recipe, since I've never made crackers before. Happy birthday anyway, Charlie.

Shannon and I found the laundromat today. It's right next to a place that only serves baked potatoes. I love this town. While a load was washing, she was telling me about this dish that her roommate used to make for them during college. I was skeptical at first, because kiwi and ground beef did not sound appealing at all, but she talked me into it because I couldn't come up with something better than we hadn't eaten already this year. She called long distance for the recipe and we went to pick up supplies.

I'm typically very against commercially prepared salad dressing, but Shannon insisted that this was a crucial ingredient and since my previous attempt at making "Italian dressing" was horrible, I figured I'd just go with it. From looking at the ingredients list, Catalina dressing is basically tomato paste, vinegar, oil, onion and sugar. A vinaigrette crossed with ketchup, basically, which is what it tasted like to me.

I put avocado on top of my Catalina Salad, which I thought was good. The whole thing was surprisingly good. However, the salad was actually supposed to be more of a dip and eaten with tortilla chips. When Shannon told me it was supposed to be eaten with tortillas, I thought she meant soft tortillas and I wanted to layer them into the dish. I guess this just goes to show that I never went to college because I can't even get my junk food ingredients right. Wait a second, I did go to college, and I offered to help tutor girls if they'd try my lamb and goat cheese sandwiches. Anyhow, my failure in this department leads us to make nachos for the next few days of September.