You haven't tasted a Caesar's salad until you've tasted it at Caesar's Restaurant Bar in Tijuana. Caesar's was closed for several years, but the famous restaurant which created the more famous salad dressing is back in business, and the salad lives again. Especially tonight, when 26 of us gathered there for the celebratory dinner before we begin work in earnest tomorrow. A staff employee mixed the dressing before our eyes. I feel soooo enlightened to know how it really should taste. If you want the salad as it was originally intended, you may find the recipe at http://www.caesarstijuana.com/site/recipes. (Sorry, the link should be functional, but I'm doing this from Tijuana, and the blogspot tools don't seem to work right here for some reason, so you'll just have to copy and paste.)
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| A photo of Caesar with his famous salad greets you at the entry. |
Attending a religious service in Spanish creates a genuine appreciation for the benefit of those Netflix subtitles, but the faithful were appreciative of attending a service that further connected them with the locals. I had the advantage of sitting next to a couple cute little girls who pointed out to the gringo next to them what page of the program to pay attention to. I don't think it occurred to them that an adult who didn't know where we were in the program would not be able to follow the Spanish liturgy. But getting help made me accepted in a klutzy sort of a way.
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| A modest chapel awaited worshippers Sunday morning. |
After church, there was the obligatory shopping spree in Rosarito, a tourist mecca near Tijuana with the usual kitch in such numbers that you wonder how long it has been sitting in those shops gathering dust. But if you look long enough and skeptically enough, there are items to be had. I talked a merchant from $20 down to $8 for a hooded cotton serape, and I could have purchased vanilla at a very good price. But who knows whether the cute five-year-old condo neighbor even wants that serape. And there was no way get a bottle of vanilla past airport security in a carry-on. It was frustrating. But Karen, one of our party, bought a key ring created specially for a friend in Seattle. It was woven on the spot in six minutes by a Maximillian, a Zapotec Indian from Oaxaca, who had been making them since his father taught him how to do it when he was six years old. The following two photos show his hands at work, and the finished product.
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| Max weaves a name onto a strip of cloth for a key ring. |
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| Max and Karen show off the six-minute key ring. |
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| At Caesar's. The dinner before the work begins. |
Love,
Robert
What a delightful story about you and the little girls at mass! It seems you had a lovely day. I found this on Wiki: His daughter Rosa (1928–2003) recounted that her father invented the dish when a Fourth of July 1924 rush depleted the kitchen's supplies. Cardini made do with what he had, adding the dramatic flair of the table-side tossing "by the chef. " Julia Child said that she had eaten a Caesar salad at Cardini's restaurant when she was a child in the 1920s. The earliest contemporary documentation of Caesar Salad is from a 1946 Los Angeles restaurant menu, twenty-two years after the 1924 origin stated by the Cardinis. The original Caesar salad recipe (unlike his brother Alex's Aviator's salad) did not contain pieces of anchovy; the slight anchovy flavor comes from the Worcestershire sauce. Cardini was opposed to using anchovies in his salad. In the 1970s, Cardini's daughter said that the original recipe included whole lettuce leaves, which were meant to be lifted by the stem and eaten with the fingers; coddled eggs; and Italian olive oil.
ReplyDeleteHave another good day and please take care of yourself while you're at it.
Donna
Rapunzel's hair dresser