Recipe Rundown: "Little Gems with Sugar Snap Peas and Ranch-y Dressing" from Carla Lalli Music's That Sounds So Good

Carla Lalli Music is a celebrity chef, former Bon Appétit content creator, and YouTube personality, living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Her first cookbook, Where Cooking Begins: Uncomplicated Recipes to Make You a Great Cook, published by Penguin Random House and released in 2019, is a James Beard Award winner. Her second and most recent book, That Sounds So Good, also published by Penguin, is a New York Times Best Seller.

I have a confession: I love ranch. 

Despite its reputation for being bland, ranch has the perfect balance of tangy and creamy, and it's a great dipping sauce, salad dressing, or sandwich condiment. 

While the classic Hidden Valley is welcome here, I'm more specifically referring to the homemade variety, as featured in another recipe from Carla Lalli Music's cookbook, That Sounds So Good, "Little Gems with Sugar Snap Peas and Ranch-y Dressing" (found on page 75).

This recipe was a delight to make--the dressing is so intuitive, with buttermilk and sour cream as a base, accompanied by plenty of granulated AND fresh garlic, nutritional yeast, lemon juice, and dried mint. 

Oh, the dried mint! I don't use dried or fresh mint very often in the kitchen, finding it too akin to toothpaste at times. So, when I saw dried mint on the ingredient list, I raised my brow. I was so wrong!

The cooling mint that I miraculously found in my pantry goes shockingly well with the bite of the garlic and the tang of the buttermilk. Nutritional yeast, which Carla includes to "evoke cheese without any sharpness or funk," elevates this dressing to something shockingly good. Lick-the-spoon-clean, good.

There's a lot of potential in this recipe to add in things that you like, which brings me to one of the appeals of Carla's books: her "Spin It" section at the bottom of every recipe, a place that offers possible ways to "spin" most of the ingredients if you happen to be missing them. 

For example, instead of little gem lettuce, Carla suggests "romaine, Bibb, or any red-leaf or green-leaf lettuce you like." I didn't have little gem lettuce, myself (it's expensive where I live, and that's if I can even find it outside of specialty grocers), so I used romaine like she suggests. Genius. 

Another example: my dad, sent on a grocery run, returned home with frozen snow peas...no sweat, because Carla says I can "replace the peas with 2 Persian cucumbers." I didn't have Persian cucumbers, either (which are the mini ones), but I did have an English cucumber. Problem solved. I also added some chopped spring onions, simply because they're great in most salads. 

That's the beauty of Carla's recipe philosophy. There are always ways to modify a recipe to suit your needs, and there's freedom between the lines that allow for spontaneous add-ins, like my spring onions, because Carla conveys the message throughout her books that people should cook for their eaters. Put plainly: don't obsessively conform to the recipe that instructs you to use, say, olives or mushrooms if everyone in your house hates them. Make the recipe work for you, not the other way around!