Sometimes you have a salad prepared, but there is no dressing in sight. Sure, you can whip up a quick apple cider vinaigrette in a matter of minutes, but sometimes your taste buds require something more elevated. Enter this cilantro lime dressing. The truth is that a salad dressing is 50% (if not more) of a salad. A terrible dressing will ruin a salad, no matter the salad ingredients. Not every dressing goes with every salad, though. Sometimes, though, you find a dressing that seems to go great with every salad recipe, and that is how we feel about this dressing.

The great thing about this cilantro dressing is that you can use it on a raw vegan salad, pasta salad, a bowl of quinoa, a marinade for wild caught fish, or as a dipping sauce for roasted vegetables. In a normal recipe, you’d see Greek yogurt or sour cream on the ingredient list. Because this is a raw vegan recipe, we used avocado to achieve the same creaminess that those ingredients would be used for. Additionally, we added some fresh jalapeño to kick up the spice just a hair. If you are a bit timid around spicy food, you can omit this ingredient. Curious about a little spice? De-seed the jalapeño and then add it to the blender with the rest of the ingredients.

With spring approaching, this is the perfect dressing to have in your pocket of recipes. It goes great with refreshing salads that have sweet, tangy, and slightly bitter ingredients. Because it has avocado, you’ll consume a lot of healthy fats along with your salad, which helps fill you up: a crucial thing to keep in mind if you are cleansing. Finally, make sure that you consume this dressing within three to four days for optimum freshness.