Week 32 - Bacon

If you're looking for an iconic bacon dish, it's hard to do better than a BLT. I considered making a BLT for Week 32's bacon theme, but while looking around for inspiration, I happened upon recipes for a BLT salad, including this one on AllRecipes. A salad sounded perfect, so I used that recipe as a starting point (mostly for the dressing) and went from there.

The ingredients I used for the salad were:

- 1 lb of bacon ($4.49)

- 2-1/3 heads of romaine lettuce ($1.94)

- 4 oz bag of cheese and garlic croutons ($2.99)

- 1 lb of grape tomatoes ($2.49)

- 2 shallots ($0.50)

- 1/3 bunch of scallions ($0.43)

- 3/4 cup mayo ($0.81)

- 1/3 cup milk ($0.10)

- freshly ground black pepper to taste ($0.05)

- garlic powder to taste (at least 1 tbsp) ($0.05)

A salad for $13.85, a possible price for a salad like this at some restaurants, could be a bit expensive, but considering that it was less than $7 per person and we ate a ton of salad, it was actually a pretty decent price. Bacon's not cheap!

Since the entire meal was salad, it was almost entirely prep.

The starring ingredient, bacon, was the only part that actually had to be cooked - fried up and then crumbled. Everything else in the salad was just chopping - the romaine lettuce into thin strips, the tomatoes into quarters, the shallots finely chopped - or crushing, in the case of the croutons.

The dressing was just chopped up scallions, mayo, milk, black pepper, and garlic powder, all mixed together well. It wasn't the thickest dressing because of the milk, but I liked it thinner so that it would mix well with the salad.

Once all the prep was done, all that was left was to mix everything together in the largest mixing bowl we owned. As I said, it made for a gigantic salad (and we ate it all).

All together, the salad was really good, which is part of why we ate so much of it in one night. The flavors all worked really well together, which isn't really a surprise given that the BLT itself is a classic, and this is just a BLT deconstructed into salad form - croutons for the bread, plus the bacon, lettuce, and tomato.

While it was incredibly tasty, this salad couldn't have been that healthy with a pound of bacon, the mayo-based dressing, and an entire bag of croutons. That said, it tasted really refreshing because of all the lettuce and other vegetables, which we absolutely needed after spending the entire weekend eating fried seafood in Connecticut (more on that another time). Although it was a fair amount of prep work, I'd definitely make this salad again. It makes for a great summer dinner.