See, here’s what happened: some friends of ours just had a baby, their third little boy, and I dropped off some buzzyfoods goodies for them all to munch on, including a couple of jars of salad dressing, that nice honey mustard I’ve just about perfected, and a jar of blue cheese dressing that is so darned good I buy iceberg lettuce instead of our more usual romaine just because it tastes so very, very good with the blue cheese. Barb agrees; but then she had to go off of dairy, and Justin had kinda claimed the honey mustard as his own…
So,
I decided to drop off a second care package, with a bit of dairy-free but wicked good chocolate cake, some decidedly not dairy-free apple galette, a second jar of honey mustard for Justin, and for Barb, to make up for her missing out on the blue 
cheese, I came up with this, slightly zippy, variation on the well-covered (at least in these pages) French dressing. It’s quite simple to make in a blender, and with mostly common ingredients, you can whip up a batch in next to no time.
Where some French dressings are built on ketchup, this one is built on my own barbecue sauce, which is sweet and spicy and hard to beat, in my mebbe-not-so-humble opinion. If you don’t want to make my recipe (or aren’t on my list when I make a fresh batch), use your own preferred sweet and spicy sauce – we quite like Sweet Baby Ray’s in a pinch.
INGREDIENTS
•1/4 cup sugar
•1/2 sweet onion, chopped
•1/4 tsp paprika
•1/4 tsp celery salt
•1/4 tsp dry mustard
•1/4 tsp Aleppo pepper – OR mebbe 1/8 tsp Cayenne, which will add some heat, but not the musky smokiness of the Aleppo
•1/4 cup cider vinegar
•1/3 cup barbecue sauce
•1/2 cup vegetable oil
Add the onion, sugar, and seasonings to a blender jar, then top with the barbecue sauce and the vinegar and blend until the onion is finely minced and you have this thick, creamy-looking purée.
With the blender running, sl-o-o-o-wly stream the oil in through the opening in the blender lid, allowing the dressing to absorb and emulsify the oil.
Transfer your dressing to a lidded jar and store in the fridge until needed.
It’ll be good-to-go right out of the blender, but allow it to rest overnight and the flavor will improve.
Options: feel free to substitute yellow or red onion for the sweet, and adjust the seasonings to suit your preferences – check out French Dressing on this here interweb thingy and you’ll find I’ve tried lots of variations. I will note that I use about half the sugar called for in other salad dressing recipes available on the web, and no one has seemed to miss it; and, I would not recommend using olive oil in place of the veggie for this dressing as olive oil tends to turn into a solid lump in the fridge, which is not a very good thing for this dressing.
Aside from simply dressing a salad, you could also pour a bit of this dressing over some freshly peeled and sliced carrots, then stash ’em in the fridge overnight before tossing with some freshly chopped parsley and serving as a snack.
Yum.