T1B

Hey Mikey, can you post your recipe for your caesar dressing one more time? I tried to find the old thread using the "search" feature, but it didn't come up.

Do you pare old topics now and again or something? It came up when I last looked for it (last year I think).

I had a group coming over for dinner last night and couldn't find the recipe here, so I ended up using Sara Moulton's version from foodnetwork.com and just tweaked it until it tasted like yours.

I don't know. I posted my chili recipe a while back and it's not to be found anymore either. It might have been on SCIII or something, though.

Here's the caesar salad recipe. As usual with my stuff, amounts aren't exact. Adjust it to your own taste.

Dressing

Take a small can of whole anchovy fillets and chop into small pieces. Put them in a glass mixing bowl. Add:

Juice of one medium lemon
About a heaping tablespoon of Grey Poupon mustard.
A couple large cloves of garlic, minced.
3 or 4 dashes of Lea and Perrins Worcestershire (did I spell it wright?) sauce
A couple tabspoons of Best Foods mayo. I use the volume equivalent of about one egg. This takes the place of the raw or cottled egg in the classic recipe.

Stir all this up with a wire whisk or a fork until the mayo is completely mixed with the liquid parts.

You can also add freshly ground black pepper, but it gives my wife coughing fits, so I just add it to the individual servings.

Add EVOO, about twice as much as the other ingredients combined. Mix again. You can put this aside and refrigerate if you want to. If it's too strong from the lemon or other ingredients, add more EVOO.

Croutons

These are almost as important as the dressing. As far as I'm concerned you cannot get a passable crouton in a box from the store.

Cut up 3 or 4 large slices (or more) of sourdough bread into 1/2" pieces. Put them into a large Tupperware (or equivalent) bowl that has a snap-on cover.
Add:
Garlic powder
Salt
A little paprika
Grated parmesan cheese (Kraft in the green can works best).
Enough EVOO to dampen all the croutons.

Cover the bowl and shake until everything is evenly distributed. Taste one of the pieces of bread. It should have a nice garlicy, salty flavor.

Spread the whole thing onto a large cookie sheet in a single layer. Toast in the oven at 300 - 350 until crunchy. If you need more seasoning you can add it at any time. Toss them around occasionally so they toast evenly. Make sure you don't burn them.
When these come out you're going to want to eat them all before you put them on the salad. My kids go nuts over these.

Put it together
Grate some good fresh parmesan cheese, the real kind that you get in a wedge.
Chop up, rinse and spin dry a bunch of romaine lettuce.
Add the croutons to the lettuce and pour on some dressing. Make sure the dressing is well mixed before you pour it on so the anchovie pieces aren't all in the bottom.
Add some grated cheese and toss.
Sprinkle some more cheese and add fresh ground pepper to individual servings.

Enjoy

Some things you can add that go well with the other ingredients:
Pieces of avocado
Sliced mushrooms
Thinly sliced red onions

Thanks!

One variation from this that I like to do is to put the garlic, minced anchovies, worchestershire(yeah, you got it) and lemon juice into the food processor and whir until smooth. This not only gives you a better blend of ingredients (I think, anyway), but prevents someone getting a large piece of garlic or anchovy in a single bite. I started doing this because I *hate* anchovies(though caesar dressing doesn't taste right without them) and my wife likes the taste of garlic, but doesn't like the *kapow!* you can get if you bite into a big piece.

I learned by watching a guy in a restaurant that we used to go to fairly regularly. One of those old steakhouses with dark walls and high backed red vinyl booths, and waiters with New York accents wearing coats and ties. You could order caesar salad for two and they would bring out a cart with all the ingredients and make it at your table. They would start with a big wooden bowl and crush the garlic in the bowl, spreading it all around inside. The lemon was already cut and had one of those elastic sort of cheese cloth thingies to keep the seeds from squeezing out. He'd mix all the dressing ingredients in the bowl and then add the lettuce and croutons. And they did use a cottled egg back then in those wild naive days when we didn't worry about food-borne illnesses ('sup Dins).

At the end the waiter we usually got would always ask in his heavy NY accent "would you like some freshly grated par-mee-san?"

Bananas Foster was another "at-the table" specialty.

Crazy times!!

As I was making the dressing for the dinner last night, I realized like a nimrod that I had forgotten to get dijon mustard at the store. I called up the in-laws and asked them if they could stop on the way to our house and pick some up. About an hour later they arrived and said that they stopped at three supermarkets and none of them carried dijon mustard. Welcome to central Texas...lol. Fortunately I found an unopened bottle of Gulden's spicy brown mustard in the pantry and used that instead. At least it wasn't fucking French's. The dressing still turned out really good, but just had a little extra zing to it.

I cooked a lasagna, garlic bread and the caesar salad for the meal. Everything turned out fine except for the caesar salad. Why? A couple of the guests weren't sure if they'd like my dressing, so they asked the OL to ask me to put it on the side. ??? Excuse' moi, but not only do I kick ass in the kitchen, but caesar salad (thanks to Mikey's recipe)is one of the things that I do best. I was pissed because in order to get the taste of caesar salad right, you have to mix in just the right amount of dressing, croutons and parmesan to get the perfect coating on each piece of the salad. They wanted to have the dressing on the side so they could put it on themselves.

Everyone dishes up their grub. The OL puts some of the caesar dressing over her salad.

OL: Woo! This stuff is (too) tangy!

Me(in my head): *meltdown*...deep breath...deep breath...okay, NOW talk.

Me: That's why you mix in the dressing before serving caesar salad, remember, sweetie?

OL: Oh, that's right...

She adds some more salad to her plate so there isn't too much dressing anymore.

OL: Hmm....I've got too many croutons on my plate now.

Me(in my head): *meltdown*....deep breath...deep breath...okay, NOW talk.

Me: That's why you mix in the dressing before serving caesar salad. The dressing binds the croutons, parmesan and romaine together so that you get an even mix.

OL: Oh...oot.

David, our 4y/o normally likes lasagna, but only choked down like three bites, and that was only after Monica coaxed him to open his mouth. He then declared that he was full. He then walked up to me a few hours later...

The Dave: Daddy, I hungry.

Me: That's because you didn't eat my lasagna.

The Dave: I want real food.

Me: Lasagna IS real food.

The Dave: No, it make me sick.

*PPBBBBRRRRRTTT!*

The Dave: See? Your lasagna made my butt fart.

Me: Bwahahahaa

War kids.