Ceasar Salad

     My eyes were opened to the intricacies of a good Caesar salad by our mom's best friend, Sari.  Rather than just tossing lettuce into a bowl and pouring dressing over it, she showed me how to make a paste of garlic cloves and anchovies and smear it around the bowl before adding the lettuce so that each bite of salad would have that same bite of garlic and salt of anchovy.  The salad dressing is from Martha Stewart's Good Food Fast (a book so popular in our family, it is commonly known as "the bible").  The recipe suggests adding anchovies to the dressing, but I omitted them because they're used in the actual salad.  The way you interpret this recipe is really up to you: if you like garlic, add more garlic, if you like anchovies, add more anchovies.  One thing I beg of you, however, is to use fresh-ground black pepper; there really is no substitute for the subtle heat of coarse ground pepper and using pre-ground pepper just does not do justice to this spice. 
     I made this particular salad for my weekly dinner at Aunt Nesi's.  I didn't add as many anchovies as I would have liked (I have a strange fondness for canned, cured fish), but the salad ended up being a perfect compliment to the hot wings that Nesi made for dinner, a way to cool down our mouths after eating copious amounts of spicy deliciousness.  One tip for this salad is to microwave the lemons before slicing and juicing them; they will yield a lot more juice. 

Materials:
     For Salad:
Romaine Lettuce
Garlic Cloves
Anchovies (I prefer flat fillets packed in olive oil, but rolled fillets with capers are equally delicious)
Parmesan Cheese (to garnish)
Black Pepper
     For Dressing:
Lemon Juice
Low-fat Mayonnaise
Garlic
Grated Parmesan Cheese
Black Pepper

To prepare dressing, combine equal parts lemon juice, mayonnaise, and Parmesan cheese in a blender.  Add one garlic clove.  Blend until smooth.  Add black pepper to taste. 

To prepare salad, smash 3 anchovies and 2 large garlic cloves into a paste in the bottom of a salad bowl using any flat-bottomed glass.  Tear a piece of lettuce and use it to smear the paste all around the bottom and sides of the bowl.  Leave that piece of lettuce in the bowl, and cut and add the remaining lettuce.  Squeeze the juice of one half of a lemon over the lettuce. Mix the salad to more evenly distribute the anchovy-garlic paste, garnish with Parmesan cheese and black pepper.  Enjoy!