Week 37 - Bacon

I wrote almost all of this post in September. Not sure why I never finished it and posted it, but considering all the time references in the first half of the post, try to pretend you're reading it in early fall...

Salads aren't the easiest thing for a little one to eat (a point I think I've made on here several times in the past), so a salad wouldn't normally have been my first choice for the Week 37 bacon challenge. But when looking for something to make, I found a vegan BLT pasta salad on This Savory Vegan, loved the sound of the recipe, and decided to make my own tempeh bacon to go with it. I figured there would be enough other stuff in the salad that the greens wouldn't be a huge part, so B would be able to eat it.

Salad, but where's the bacon?

Then I put together my grocery list, A went to Trader Joe's, and no tempeh. I started reading on various grocery threads about tempeh being missing from other grocery store shelves. Someone said something about the tempeh at Trader Joe's undergoing recertification and returning at the end of October. (No idea if that was true.) Whole Foods had tempeh available, but by the time we put in a delivery order, they were out (and out for a while after that). Amazon Fresh had no tempeh. I didn't want to order any Lightlife products after their disastrous ad campaign, but I was getting desperate and willing to buy it. But their tempeh and even the Lightlife already-made-and-seasoned tempeh bacon strips were out of stock at our delivery options.

And that's how we ended up with our non-vegan but egg-free BLT pasta salad. I really wanted to make a vegan version of this, but with The Great Tempeh Shortage of 2020, that just wasn't going to happen. If I knew I was going to use regular bacon, I probably would have made something other than a salad, since what attracted me to the salad in part was the tempeh bacon since it's texturally different from pork bacon, but it's 2020, and who can predict grocery shortages these days?

Anyway, I went ahead with the same recipe for the vegan BLT pasta salad but just replaced the vegan bacon with the bacon we had in the freezer. The ingredients for our version were:

for the dressing:

- 1/2 cup Vegenaise ($1.25)

- 1/4 cup olive oil ($0.40)

- 2 tbsp apple cider vinegar ($0.14)

- garlic powder ($0.03)

- small bunch of parsley ($1.18)

- salt and pepper ($0.02)

the rest of the salad:

- 2/3 package pasta ($2)

- 3 strips of bacon ($1.50)

- 12 oz grape tomatoes ($2.09)

- 1 avocado ($0.75)

- 1/2 red onion ($0.50)

- 2 green onions ($0.25)

- 1 large head of romaine ($2.49)

The salad cost about $12.06. It did make a lot of salad by volume, way more salad than you would get at any of the salad chains for that price. If I had made it with tempeh bacon, it would have cost more than that, but if I had more bacon than the three strips in the freezer, it would have cost more too.

The salad took a while to make, mostly because of the prep involved - making the pasta, frying the bacon, washing and chopping the tomatoes, cubing the avocado, slicing the onion, finely chopping the green onions, finely chopping the parsley, making the dressing, and then the most time-consuming part, chopping the romaine into thin strands. If this salad was just for A and me, I would have probably roughly chopped the romaine, not caring how it ended up in the salad. But B hadn't had much lettuce yet because it's a tougher thing for young kids to eat, so I had to slice the romaine into thin strands including part of the rib in each slice. With limited counter and cutting board space, getting the romaine done took a while.

Assembly was easy. I mixed together all the salad ingredients other than the pasta and the bacon, added the dressing, and then added the pasta (since we cooked the whole package) until it looked like a balanced amount compared to the vegetables, continuing to mix until the dressing had coated everything. The reason I didn't add the bacon was because I had fried it until it was very crispy, and upon crumbling it, it seemed a little too crunchy for B. So I left it on the side to top our salads. The salad without the bacon, after tasting it, seemed very bland. The bacon pretty much added all the flavor, but that's what we were expecting for a BLT salad. Of course, the next time I made bacon and it was crispy, B tried it and loved it, crunch and all, so I guess I could have added it here and mixed it in.

Fast-forward to December...

This post has been sitting in drafts for so long that I ended up making tempeh bacon like I wanted to originally (but with a side of potatoes instead of in a salad) before posting. It didn't taste exactly like bacon, and you could definitely tell the difference, but it was delicious. I now see why the tempeh recipe I followed used two packs of tempeh, because we finished our single package very quickly and wanted more. I wish I had been able to use this tempeh bacon for this salad, but since I didn't technically make it for the challenge, that's all I'm going to say about that right now. As long as they keep tempeh in stock, I definitely want to keep making this!