Weekend Plans Post: How to Make a Truly Decadent Chicken Caesar Salad
The Caesar Salad is a mainstay around our household. It was one of the few things we were really good at making back in the first year of our marriage (when our next best meal was probably Kraft Dinner) and it has stuck around. Now, I’m better at making it today than I was then… but it wasn’t substantially different.
This particular recipe will make two dinner-portion salads or six-eight side salad portions.
First off! Get your ingredients:
Maribou prefers Baby Spring Mix. I kinda prefer Romaine Lettuce but it’s not a *STRONG* preference. (Baby Spinach works really well for this too.)
A really high quality Caesar dressing. The best ones are homemade, of course… but, let’s face it, nobody has time for that after the first time they make one.
Tomatoes. I used to prefer getting Roma tomatoes and quartering them. Those little baby tomatoes are 90% as good for 10% of the effort.
Roasted Shredded Chicken. Sure, you could buy a rotisserie chicken and shred it yourself. Heck, you could buy an entire raw chicken and put it in the crock pot with a quartered lemon up inside of it and save even more money! I buy the pre-roasted, pre-shredded stuff.
Really high quality croutons. I like the Parmesan Caesar Deli-Style because of the different colors for the salad. (Make it look pretty.)
Bacon crumbles.
Finishing shredded parmesan (not pictured).
And really coarsely ground black pepper. The coarser the better.
You’ll also need your salad spinner and a big ol’ rectangular sealed containers like holds more than a couple of quarts big.
First off, WASH YOUR HANDS! Then put your lettuce in the salad spinner.
Okay, remove the lettuce from the container and then put it in the mesh basket from your salad spinner.
Run it under the tap to wash it one last time…
Put it in your spinner, attach the lid and SPIN.
Here is the wiki entry for Centripetal Force.
Okay, take your salad from the spinner and dump it into the container.
Dump some of your baby tomatoes into a bowl and wash your tomatoes.
Dump them into the container.
Get you your croutons and throw a couple of handfuls into the container.
Get your chicken…
Now there are plenty of different ways to go about this. You can, for example, heat your chicken first. You can use a hot rotisserie chicken and shred it yourself and throw that chicken in there. Sometimes I do this with chicken tenders that are hot from the deli and I slice them into strips first (or bake them in the oven from some of the frozen tenders in the freezer aisle). You can probably get away with sliced steak! Or tofu, maybe. I guess. (I haven’t tried.)
But I’m putting in cold chicken.
This particular brand of Caesar dressing is the closest that I have found to the from-scratch dressing that the boss would whip up at the restaurant. Girard’s. The secret ingredient? Anchovies. Just like the boss used to make.
Use more than you think you’re going to need to. Like, it’s better to have a little too much than a little not enough.
Now, here is where I added the lid and shook it up and gave Maribou her half of the salad.
Seriously, put the lid on and shake well and do a little dance with it. Shake it like a polaroid picture.
After Maribou got her serving, I went back to the tub and finished the salad the way that I recommend you serve it.
Add some bacon:
Add some black pepper. Seriously, a *LOT* of black pepper.
When you’re done, be sure to sprinkle your finishing cheese on top and then put even more black pepper on it:
Seriously, this is a salad that you can serve to your boss when you have him over for dinner to discuss your raise. This is a salad that you can bring to the church function and not worry about bringing any back home. This is the salad that you can make on that “hey, let’s cook something together!” date. Seriously, you’d pay $19 for this at a fancy schmancy restaurant and not feel ripped off after you sopped up the last of the dressing with your roll.
This salad knocks it out of the park.
This weekend, however, will not be a salad weekend.
Diablo II Resurrected is released today (at 9AM) and I have requested tomorrow off. Which means that my Diablo buddies will be halfway through nightmare by the time I show up to create my Level 1 Necromancer (“Jaybone”).
As such, this weekend will be spent playing games but we have a game night on Saturday night and we’ll test some board games out there. Oh, and I have to do some more studying for the dang test.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is the ingredients for the salad. All photos taken by the author.)
I’m looking forward to your D2: Resurrected review. I’m still on the fence about the game. I’ve also decided to put new game purchases on hold and try to work through my backlog (though the new Metroid game might change my mind). Also, EU4 will be free on Epic next week (but that’s not a purchase, so it’s just an addition to the backlog).
Tomorrow we take the dogs to the vet for immunizations, and tomorrow night we go to dinner for our anniversary. The yard also needs mowing, but at least we’re getting to the time of year where it grows a lot slower.Report
I’ve still not beaten Act 1 and, as such, I have nothing to say that I haven’t already said here.
I’m pretty sure that I will be neck deep in nostalgia for my first playthrough before I get frustrated by the absolute and total lack of drops and then wander back to more modern schtuff.
But, for now, I am *LOVING* my Necromancer.Report
I’m at the beginning of Act II and I still haven’t found a unique drop. Not a one.
That said, I am swimming in gems to an extent that I do not remember from the early oughts.Report
Maybe we have been spoiled by the generosity of DIII (after they got rid of the real money auction house). It’s been too long since I have played, so I cannot remember anything about the original drop rates.Report
I don’t remember either and I spent a lot more time in Nightmare than Normal but I remember having at least *ONE* unique by Act II.
I think.Report
ANCHOVIES!!! In the dressing, yes, and get a tin of the tasty lil’ fishies and put them lil’ suckers right on the salad like the rich, delicious strips o’ FLAVA that they are!
MOAR ANCHOVIESReport
You don’t even need the bacon.Report
This is where I will beg to differ.
The boss would put anchovies on the Caesar if there were a special request (and I had a couple like that on occasion) but that’s one of those things that you can’t just spring on people.
They’ll start calling it “anchovy salad” and you’ll be the “anchovy guy” and your mom will answer the phone and say “there’s nobody called ‘anchovy’ here” and you’ll have to grab the phone from her…
Best to just keep them hidden in the Caesar.Report
MOAR ANCHOVIESReport
THEN MOARReport
Our household’s go-to salad:
Spring Mix
Sliced Strawberries
Feta
Sliced Almonds
Dressing of Olive Oil, Balsamic Vinegar, Dijon Mustard, a dash of Honey, a bit of Salt
Another salad we make less frequently but that is also great:
Spring Mix
Parmesan (grate or shave your own from a block, or the pre shredded kind; not the powder)
Sliced Olives (we usually buy a medley of olive types in oil and bay leaves and oregano)
Bell Peppers (I like the sweet ones)
Dressing of Olive Oil, Tarragon Vinegar, minced garlic, salt, black pepper, and pecarino romanoReport
We probably need to discuss Olive Oil one of these days…
In the short term, I’ll just say that I’ve not found one better than Carapelli Unfiltered Extra Virgin olive oil. They sell it in *HUGE* bottles at the Costco but in smaller ones at finer stores everywhere (my buddy Fish told me that he saw them at Wal-Mart).
This is a gorgeous greenish blonde oil that is thick and flavorful and good enough to eat with little more than hot bread and black pepper.Report
That’s a good looking salad, and Girard’s is easily the best of the bottled dressings.
Any more, I make my salads with sliced cucumber, carrot, tomato, red bell pepper, and red onion and dribble some olive oil and balsamic vinegar and top with fresh ground pepper. I got tired of watching the greens turn yucky before I could use them.Report
No politics, but what’s the deal with that EBT sticker? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one before. Is it a new thing, or a regional thing? Or peculiar to downmarket stores? Is there something about the shredded chicken in particular that makes its EBT eligibility non-obvious? Because it’s pre-cooked, maybe?Report
From what I understand, no politics of course, but you cannot use EBT to buy hot food from the deli. You want hot chicken? Not available. It’s the law.
Pre-cooked (but cold) chicken, on the other hand, can be purchased with EBT from the deli.Report
It’s about sales tax.
EBT money is legally required to be spent ONLY on merchandise; if some of it goes to sales tax then it’s a Federal or state subsidy of local governments (or else it’s just the state giving someone money and then immediately taking it back).
And union contracts have established that making food hot is an act of Food Service and is therefore Employee Labor and thus contains “work”, and therefore you have to pay sales tax on hot food. “Oh, but labor went into cutting up that package of chicken!” Sure, but that labor happened in a factory somewhere else, and there wasn’t any work in the store that went into preparing it. (Except for something things where there is work done in the store, which means you can be in a situation where a whole watermelon is EBT-eligible but that same watermelon cut into chunks is not.)
This is also why, as people occasionally discover and get angry about, you don’t pay sales tax on a pre-sliced bagel with a cup of cream cheese but you do pay sales tax on a pre-sliced bagel that someone spreads cream cheese on and hands to you.Report