Desperately Seeking Caesar
When we first arrived and were not eating dinner on an Argentinian schedule (i.e., at midnight), we would often stop in to a cafe to eat our evening meal. Several times, we attempted the Caesar Salad.
This was folly though–thus far, it has not been the salad for which we hoped. Here, it often contains ham, or chicken, or chunks of cheddar cheese, or hunks of an unidentified white cheese, or hard boiled egg…all topped with masses of an artfully arranged heavy mayonnaise dressing.
Still craving a more traditional Caesar salad, we decided to make our own while entertaining guests for the first time last night.
Sounds easy, you don’t need a lot of ingredients, but getting romaine lettuce proved to be both expensive (in cab fare) and time consuming. First I checked at my verduleria (local produce seller)–the lettuce there was so limp, I couldn’t believe that they were trying to sell it. I ran to the Disco (local grocery). Same thing–the entire head would fall over in my hand if I tried to pick it up.
I hopped a cab and rode 20 minutes to an open air market in Belgrano. No luck, it was closed. So I started walking around Belgrano until I found a Carrefour, another supermarket, and bought what seemed like every head of lettuce in the place. (The check-out guy gave me the “crazy foreigner” look.) We stripped off a lot of slimy limp outer leaves and, hooray, discovered some yummy, actually crunchy, bright green romaine lettuce on the inside, just waiting to get out.
I’m happy to say that we were able to serve a decent Caesar salad to our first Argentinian dinner guests (not counting Ian, of course).
Our guests were Sara King, who is here in Argentina from Portland visiting the city for a few months, and Ian’s friends, Dani and Guada. (Guadalupe brought us home-baked alfajores–sort of a butter cookie with dulce de leche in the middle–yummy.)
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That was one dang good salad!
*laugh* I was a bit obsessed!