4th of July Kebabs?!

Yesterday, the 4th of July (birthdate of this great country) Court and I decided to try a recipe that we'd recently seen on Tyler's Ultimate, the show of one of the Food Network's celebrity chefs, Tyler Florence. Generally we are a little leery of Mr. Florence's work due again to our petty dislikes of certain aspects of his on-show personality and his dubious affiliation with Applebees. However, when a recipe looks good, a recipe looks good.

The basis of the recipe is a chicken kebab. Now I know in these "Times of Terror" a less enlightened patriot might question the making of food from the middle east for a 4th of July celebration, but have no fear. This recipe was actually of italian descent via Mexico at heart. Mexico?? Not much better than middle-eastern, say you? Let the author state that we had no political reasoning for our choice of July 4th meals. It just looked like a good summery meal that involved that wonderful culinary invention, the grill.

The recipe essentially involves a rehashing of that old classic, the Caesar salad. Chicken, Italian sausage and large hunks of bread are put on a kebab and doused with olive oil before being put on the grill. Tyler Florence also put bay leaves between each meat/bread combo on the skewers, but we only had dried bay that would've crumbled if we tried to stick it on so we omitted this. The kebabs are cooked to doneness on the grill and then put over romaine lettuce leaves and dressed with a classic Caesar dressing. We made the dressing from scratch and used a bastard version of Tyler Florence's recipe and the recipe Julia Child used in Julia & Jacques Cooking at Home. Because we sort of made it up as we went along I don't feel bad in putting the recipe here:

1 lemon
2 egg yolks
1 garlic glove, peeled
1 anchovy fillet or the equivalent in paste (apparently not used in the original Caesar salad recipe)
1 tsp. mustard (I used the smoother Dijon, but I suppose you could use whole grain)
Several dashes of Worcestershire Sauce
1/4 cup (ish) of Olive Oil
salt and pepper to taste

Combine the egg yolks and the juice from the lemon in a food processor. Add the garlic, anchovy fillet or paste, salt and pepper and the mustard. Blend these together until they are uniform in consistency and the lemon juice is emulsified somewhat. Now with the food processor running drizzle in the olive oil until the consistency is right for a salad dressing. Now adjust the lemon juice, salt and pepper as necessary and add the Worcestershire sauce in a few steps, tasting between each addition until you have the flavor you want. Toss your lettuce, chicken, sausage and grilled "croutons" in the dressing. Enjoy.

-Nick

P.S. As a little aside. In Julia & Jacques Cooking at Home there is a little anecdote regarding Caesar salad by Julia Child, who grew up in San Diego, CA. She and her family visited Tijuana and ate at the restaurant of Caesar Cardini, inventor of the Caesar salad. She gives a wonderful description of how the true "classic Caesar salad" was prepared at the table. This anecdote explains that despite people's misconception that the Caesar salad is a reference to the Roman tyrants, it is in fact an invention of an Italian living in Tijuana, Mexico. Don't believe me? Check out the Wikipedia page. Checking the Wiki page will show you that originally it was Worcestershire sauce and not anchovy that gave the dressing its distinctive flavor. We included both, as well as garlic which was not in the original recipe.