I don't buy a lot of salad dressing. Not because I'm not lazy - I am very lazy in many ways - but because the odds of me wanting either one flavor of dressing until the bottle runs out, or a half-dozen bottles of dressing in an already full-to-bursting fridge door, are pretty slim. So I make a lot of viniagrettes. But making a proper viniagrette, with the bowl and the whisking and all, can actually be more work than I'm willing to go through for a quick salad.

Enter the Squeezebottle Viniagrette.

The only equipment you'll need is a plastic squeeze bottle, of the type you often see chefs using to make squiggly sauce lines on plates. They're a good thing to have around, so pick a couple up. I'll wait.

Next, you need to decide what kind of viniagrette you like. Me, I like vinegar, so my viniagrettes tend toward 1:1 ratios, but 1:2 is more common, so let's pretend you've chosen that. Estimate roughly how much dressing you want to make, take the vinegar of your choice, and pour 1/3 that amount into the squeeze bottle. Then take olive oil, and pour twice as much oil into the bottle as you have vinegar in the bottle. You can eyeball this, because the oil and vinegar will separate.

Then seasonings. I recommend dried seasonings for squeeze bottle viniagrettes. I've tried using fresh garlic, shallot, and herbs, but they just clog up the hole in the top of the squeeze bottle. A pinch of salt, a grind or two of black pepper, maybe some granulated garlic, dried crushed herbs, or whatever. This is meant to be simple and fast, and doesn't need to be elaborate.

Put your finger over the squeezehole (a phrase guaranteed to get my site flagged by SafeSearch) and shake it like a Polaroid picture full of salad dressing. Shake it like it won't stop crying. Then, when you're done, you can use the squeeze bottle to precisely dispense your dressing as you see fit. If there's any left over, it'll keep in the fridge, but it'll only be one small bottle, and it will be gone, usually, in the next application. Just remember to shake it again before you use it, unless you're secretly a molecular gastronomist and added chemical stabilizers to keep the emulsion intact in the fridge, in which case you really shouldn't be taking advice from me, and should get back to turning apple juice into caviar.