Chicken Caesar Salad!

Hey guys! Wait...wait..I know. before you even say it, let me apologize for being M.I.A. these past few days. I have a huge paper due for my english class that's kind of been taking up all of my writing energy. Even though I'd obviously rather be doing this. Anywho, enough with the explanations, onto the next topic. I've decided to expand the blog in order to increase the amount of posts per week. I'll still be doing recipes, but probably one or two a week, and then there will be cooking show reviews, restaurant reviews, and just general posts about food. Okay...without further adieu, onto the food!

I decided to make chicken caesar salad for dinner the other night with home made creamy caesar dressing, hence the title. There are a few main components that are always involved in caesar dressing, so I decided to try and combine them and make my own spin on caesar dressing rather than using a recipe. I feel like ceasar salad in itself is like a quintessential meal. Think about it, you can add shrimp or any other type of seafood for that matter, steak, and of course chicken. Or, you have to option to serve it without a type of meat as a side dish. Below you'll learn the ins and outs of how to make home made dressing, and briefly how to make a classic caesar salad.

First, you want to just roughly run your knife through some garlic. This will make it so that the cloves will be chopped up the same size when we put it in the blender. I used 3 cloves.

Then, put them in the blender and pulse it a few times. Don't be too particular since we will be running it through again and again as we keep adding ingredients. Then, you want to add a few tablespoon of red wine vinegar. If i remember correctly, I used 2.

Then, add about a tablespoon of anchovy paste. Nasty, I know, but believe it or not, almost all caesar dressing has anchovies in it. 

Add a few tablepoons of dijon mustard to the mix, and pul it together until its all combined. I used about 3 tablepoons.

Squeeze the juice of one lemon into the blender, and mix. A tip to figure out if a lemon is ripe or not while at the grocery store is to smell them. If you cna smell the lemon scent, it means that the piece of fruit is fully ripened.

Add about a cup a freshly grated parmesan cheese and blen together until its smooth.

It should look something like this by the time you've blended all of the ingredients together.

Next, you want to gradually add about 3/4 of a cup of olive oil. Here, we have my brother Mike who can barely make easy-mac but likes to help me cook so I give him jobs like this. If you can find someone to do this for you like Mike, then feel free.

Add about 1 and 1/4 cup of mayonnaise and one whole egg, uncooked, and blend together until it is relatively smooth and looks somewhat like this.

Pour the dressing into a container and refrigerate until you've made your salad.

To make the salad, you want to start with romaine lettuce. Tearing it into pieces is better than cutting it, but feel free to do whichever you please. I find that the lettuce cleans easier if you wash it after its been torn or cut since its not so tighly packed toghether anymore like it is when it's in its natural state.

Then, you want to cut some chicken up into small chunks, similar to a smaller version of what you'd use to make kebobs.  Mine were thick so I had to filet them first, but that's up to you.

This is how big mine were in proportion to my hand incase you're trying to get a grasp on how large to cut them up.

Toss them in a little bit of vegetable oil and season with salt and pepper. I then broiled mine since it was raining outside but if you want to, they'd be awesome grilled too.

They should look something like this when they're cooked through if you chose to broil them.

Put the cleaned romaine lettuce into a large bowl and top with the chicken, croutons, and some freshly grated parmesan cheese. Top with your homemade dressing that, at this point, should be slightly chilled from sitting in the refrigerator while you prepared the salad, and you're good to go! 

Keep the good food, good music, and good people coming!

Until next time, 

K

NONCOOKS LIFELINE:

Filet- To filet a meat is basically to thin it out, or slice it. For instance, when I did this to my chicken, I took a fileting knife and sliced the chicken in half in order to thin it out since I wanted to control the size of the pieces of chicken. You can also filet meat if you have a 'lopsided' piece of meat (ie. if you have a piece of chicken where one side is thicker than the other) and you want to ensure an even cooking time. You would just start where the thin side ended, and use that as your line point, and make the entire piece of chicken as thick as that spot. Then, you wnd up with 2 thinner, and equally sized filets.