Kathryn's Cottage Blue Cheese Dressing

March 9, 2010 Full Article at:The Nibble

Endive, radicchio, walnut and pear salad is a classic with blue cheese dressing. As delicious is this combination is, you can go much further. Use Kathryn's Cottage's exquisite Blue Cheese Dressing:

• In Baked Potatoes
• With Buffalo Wings
• On Burgers
• As A Crudit`e Dip
• With Pasta (toss with gnocchi, wilted arugula and fresh-cracked pepper)
• On Sandwiches & Wraps

Kathryn's Cottage Blue Cheese Dressing achieves a perfect balance of creaminess and cheesiness: not to much, not to little, just right. The bits of blue cheese floating in the creamy dressing are just right, too: enough to give you small tastes of fine cheese without adding so much cheese that it overwhelms the other ingredients in the dish.

Diogenes may still be looking for an honest man, but our search for the best blue cheese dressing is over. Try a salad of field greens, red onion, grape tomatoes and smoked salmon, drizzled with blue cheese dressing. Black olives optional.

Recipe For The Chicken Stack Appetizer At Top Right Of Page.

1. Build stack from thick tomato slices, cubed avocado, bacon, cubed roast chicken tossed in blue cheese dressing, another tomato slice and arugula leaves.
2. Top with top-quality minced blue cheese (break a piece of blue cheese into crumbs).
3. Garnish plate with arugula pesto: Place arugula in food processor with a small amount of olive oil and a pinch of salt, and some blue cheese (substituting for Parmesan), and process into pesto. Garnish plate with pesto and minced cheese crumbs.

Kathryn's Cottage Thousand Island Dressing

In our joy over the discovery of Kathryn's Cottage Blue Cheese Dressing, we may be giving the Thousand Island Dressing short shrift. We don't mean to: It's a best-of-breed recipe as well. We simply haven't been on the hunt for perfection (our mother handed down a pretty fine recipe to us). Beyond the salad, this fine Thousand Islander is an elegant sauce and condiment for:

• Asparagus & Other Veggies
• Burgers
• A Crudit`e Dip
• Sandwiches & Wraps: Chicken, Ham, Turkey, Reuben and Roast Beef
• Shrimp cocktail

Lovers of thousand island dressing: You'll be very happy with these.

While most people may demur over sending away for salad dressing, we'll gladly give up few cappuccinos to pay for the postage.

KATHRYN'S COTTAGE Blue Cheese Dressing & Thousand Island Dressing

• 12-Ounce Jar (355ml)$9.95
• 3 Jars $29.95

Purchase online at KathrynsCottageKitchen.com

Re-creation of local favorite salad dressing is Mooresville woman's tribute to her mother

By Melinda Skutnick | Mooresville Tribune

Published: July 24, 2009 visit online article

With her mother's homemade recipe in hand, a Mooresville woman is re-creating a once-local culinary favorite that seemingly disappeared years ago.

"Customers drove for miles to visit our restaurants for the prime rib and especially mother's bleu cheese dressing," remembered Nancy Little Hucks, who has used her mother's original recipe to create, bottle and sell Kathryn's Cottage Bleu Cheese Dressing.

Hucks' mother, Dora Blaine Little, perfected the recipe over several years in the 1950s before it became a customer favorite at various restaurants - including the former Little Kitchen, which closed one year ago - that she and her husband, Claude, operated in Mooresville and Myrtle Beach, S.C.

"Her dream when I was small was to own a restaurant and serve the finest food money could buy," said Hucks, who discussed her mother's particular love for bleu cheese dressing.

"She never found a recipe she liked totally, so she made her own, added to, took away, until she found the perfect taste and consistency," she added.

Today, more than 50 years later, Hucks has taken that recipe and made it available to the public who, she said, often inquires about her mother's unique dressing.

"So many people asked me about it," she said Wednesday, some six weeks after her first official batch made its way to several area grocers and nearly a year after a simple idea sparked a new business venture for her and her husband, Cliff.

The couple hopes to distribute and sell their original dressing throughout the Mooresville, Lake Norman and Charlotte area.

"This is the biggest tribute I could give my mother and daddy," Hucks said. Dora died in 1996 and Claude in 2008. "It's carrying on the tradition of the Little family." Hucks explained that the name of her dressing came from a variety of sources. "Kathryn," she said, is a family name from her mother's side. And it was Hucks' experience as a realtor and in interior design that brought the word "cottage" into the mix.

Currently, Kathryn's Cottage Bleu Cheese Dressing is being sold at several local stores, including NY Butcher Shop, Josh's Produce, Bradford Store, Shop 'N Save and McLaughlin Farmhouse Country Store.

Hucks said she hopes and plans to expand the line into Davidson and Charlotte stores by mid-fall.

Sold at both wholesale and retail, Hucks said she creates the dressing at Little Spaghetti in Mooresville - "they have been kind enough to let us use their kitchen" - as needed.

For more information on Kathryn's Cottage Bleu Cheese Dressing, contact Hucks at 704-677-4302.