Hey there Honey's and New-Bees!

Hope you’re all having a great day! Today I want to talk about one of my favorite and easiest dishes to make that’s always a crowd-pleaser: Caesar salad! What’s fun about a Caesar salad is that is has the ability to “dress up” (pun intended) any meal you serve it with. You can make it with romaine lettuce, or assorted lettuce, or even make it a Kale Caesar, add dried lentils or chickpeas instead of croutons… the options are pretty endless, and you can get as creative as you want! The key to any good Caesar is the dressing. Before I learned to make my own dressing, Caesar salad was something I ordered in restaurants, where the dressing usually comes from an overpriced jar – and is pretty one-dimensional tasting. The beauty of making your own dressing is that it can be as easy or as complex as you want it to be, depending on your tastes and skill level. For now we’ll start with a basic recipe, but once you have the basics down pat you can adjust it and make it your own Caesar.

Let’s go through the basics together and start with a simple Caesar dressing. Remember, it’s all about learning the basics first and building from there. At the end of the post I will share with you some simple variations to try only once you’ve mastered the basic recipe and feel like trying something a little different (or just have ingredients around the house you don’t know what else to do with ;)) so on that note let’s get to making a Caesar!

Whenever I see a recipe that calls for bacon bits I always opt to crisping my own bacon rather than buy a jar of dehydrated bacon bits (which sometimes ins’t even bacon). So to get the best results for your caesar salad take a couple of extra minutes, dice up a couple of slices of bacon and fry it with some olive oil for until it’s nice and crispy (about 5 minutes). Once it’s ready use a slotted spoon and transfer your bacon bits to a small bowl and set aside. I know if might sound a little odd to fry the bacon in olive oil since bacon is pretty greasy at fatty on its own so why would you want to add more oil. However, the olive oil will help  render out the fat which means take out the fat so you’re left with nice crispy bacon bits rather than chewy and fatty pieces of bacon in your salad.

In a small bowl, whisk your mayo and dijon together, add your garlic, anchovy paste, worcester sauce, lemon, and continue to whisk. Some of you may be thinking that you don’t like anchovies and will choose to omit it…don’t!

This is probably a key ingredient that really brings all the flavours together; and don’t worry it won’t make your salad taste fishy 😁. If you want an authentic caesar dressing you need to add the anchovy paste, and if you don’t have the paste then chop up a few anchovies and toss them in – either way you need to add them (just trust me on this one)!

So now that you’ve got the base of your dressing ready, add a 1/4 cup of grated parmesan cheese to your dressing, whisk it, then pour your dressing onto your lettuce and toss. Once tossed, top the salad your crispy bacon bits, the rest of your parmesan, and add some croutons (if you want), that’s it! Pretty easy right?! Go enjoy and please let me know in the comments section how your Caesar salad turned out!