K’aaK - Friday Evenings
On Friday evenings our guests can enjoy K’aak, the Mayan word for fire.
It is the theme of our Fiesta del Fuego, with special beach parrillada and bonefires, featuring delicious fresh seafood, steaks and whole suckling pig. Our fire dancers and Mexican trio are the entertainment for this magical evening.
Did you know the Caesar Salad was created in Mexico?
In the 1920's Italian born Caesar Cardini (1896-1956) had a small hotel in Tijuana, Mexico. The Hotel Caesar still exists at Avenida Revolucion. During the Prohibition days The Hollywood crowd and San Diego socialites would drive to Mexico to party and often they wound up at Caesar's Hotel for a meal before returning home.
Caesar’s daughter Rosa tells the story that on the Fourth of July, 1924, people arrived in droves, crowding the restaurant and the kitchen ran out of supplies. There weren't enough fresh vegetables to go around, and in those days Americans weren't wild about salad, but Caesar thought he could make a salad his patrons would really enjoy with a bit of a show, tossing it tableside.
Using ingredients that are basic to every Italian kitchen, he took lettuce (romaine or cos, as pictured below), garlic-flavored olive oil, salt and pepper, lemon juice, parmesan cheese, croutons, a little Worcestershire sauce, and a coddled egg, and he created the Caesar salad, and instant success. The famous chef Julia Child describes one in her book Julia’s Child Kitchen where she ate a Caesar salad at Cardini’s restaurant in the 1920’s.
In 1948 the Cardinis started to bottle the Caesar dressing. In 1953 the Society of Epicures in Paris reportedly called the Caesar Salad "the greatest recipe to originate from the Americas in 50 years." Today, many restaurants as well as home chefs add such ingredients as cooked chicken, shrimp or lobster to the salad for a main dish.
However, the most frequent additions to the original recipe are anchovies and vinegar, which were never in the original, although there is a taste of anchovy in the Worcestershire sauce Caesar added. According to Rosa Cardini, this is her father’s original Caesar salad recipe.
CAESAR'S SALAD
1/2 cup day-old bread, cubed
3/4 cup garlic oil, divided use
2 small heads romaine lettuce
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
2 eggs, coddled (boiled in the shell for 1 minute)
Juice of 2 medium lemons
8-10 drops of Worcestershire sauce
1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
1. To prepare the garlic oil, place 4-5 cloves of garlic, peeled and quartered, in a good quality (e.g. Extra Virgin) olive oil and let it stand at room temperature several hours or even up to 5 days.
2. To prepare croutons, pre-heat oven to 225 degrees. Toss bread cubes with 1/4 cup garlic oil and spread on a pan or baking sheet. Toss frequently and bake until golden brown, about 2 hours.
3. Wash, dry and crisp (in the refrigerator) the leaves of the romaine lettuce. Originally, Caesar left the lettuce leaves whole, and the salad was eaten with the fingers, but later he tore the outer leaves into 2-inch lengths, leaving only the small inner leaves whole, and the salad was eaten with a fork.
4. Place lettuce in a large bowl and toss with remaining 1/2 cup of garlic oil. Add salt and pepper, again tossing gently. Break the coddled eggs over the lettuce, add lemon juice and Worcestershire sauce and toss two or three times. Add croutons and cheese. Toss lightly once more.
Serves 4
