Bacon

I am sure that many of you, like me, are busy with family functions over Easter. Dinner with my family and dinner with the husband’s family always requires strategic coordination. This year my family went rogue. No ham, turkey or lamb for us, no one wanted to cook a big meal. We went to Mandarin. Slightly sacrilege I suppose, but makes everyone in my picky eating family happy. Plus we don’t celebrate the traditional Easter, we celebrate the chocolate Easter.

On Sunday however we cooked dinner for my husband’s side of the family and you can see the board here. The carrot cake was probably my favourite part of the meal. The carrot cake was vegan, and no one knew until I told them.

We also ended up with lots of leftovers, which made for a shorter menu board this week. Plus this week is a bit hectic and so I went for some quick and lazy dinners. Nothing is terribly inspired, but everything tastes good. Like last night’s dinner for example. Pierogi’s! I mean yum. I do know how to make them from scratch (I was fortunate to have a lesson directly from a friend’s Polish mother-in-law), and I often do when I have a whole weekend without other commitments. However they recently had a deal on at Costco so we bought some pre-made frozen. You always need to have those things in your freezer you can just whip up on a busy night.

In an effort not to fully phone it in I did make a warm spinach salad to go with the boiled dumplings. Nothing a little bacon and fried onions can’t fix and make feel like homemade goodness.

Pierogi's with warm spinach salad and sour cream — Pierogi’s with warm spinach salad and sour cream

Warm Spinach Salad

Ingredients

8 ounces baby spinach
8 pieces thick-sliced bacon, chopped
3 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
Onion (1 small), very thinly sliced
20-24 boiled pierogi’s (we used Pelmen Foods)
Sour cream (we used lactose free)

Directions

Fry the bacon on medium high heat. Remove from the pan and reserve on a paper towel lined plate. Remove all but 3 tbsp of bacon fat, leave in pan to cook onions.
Add onions to the pan and sauté until starting to brown.
Whisk in vinegar, sugar and mustard to make a vinaigrette.
Add spinach and coast well in vinaigrette. Allow to wilt to your preference.
Add bacon and combine. Spoon over top of pierogi’s. Top with sour cream. Enjoy 🙂

I have not posted in awhile. I was away in Dallas this week (excellent Tex-Mex!) but I am back on my routine and have been busy in the kitchen this weekend.

This weekend marked a special day, my wonderful mother turned 60. I hosted a brunch for her which included potato hash, smoked salmon and chive crema, french style baked eggs with toast points, oven baked bacon and fruit.

If you have never oven baked bacon I suggest you try it. It changed my life, no joke. I loooooove bacon. All things bacon. I know not a terribly original sentiment, many people love bacon. I hated making it at home because it always made such an incredible mess and I usually got burned by bacon spit. Why bacon, why do you have to spit on me, don’t you know I love you? It became my mission to find a painless way to make bacon.

Baking bacon is easy, and the clean-up is a synch. We get our bacon from a butcher, but if in a pinch I will buy the President Choice Old Fashion Style Naturally Smoked Extra Thick Cut Bacon. A long name, but good bacon! The key to perfect bacon without the spit, is starting with a cold oven. Plus when you are done, you just need to remove the foil, and if you have done it well you have completely clean trays. I often do not do it well and have to clean trays, but at least I am not cleaning grease spit off my walls.

Directions
– Line rimmed baking sheets with aluminum foil, then lay the bacon strips flat, making sure pieces do not overlap.
– Place trays in the oven. Turn oven on to 425 degrees. Let the bacon come to temperature with the oven.
– Bake until crisp and browned, 12 to 15 minutes, or desired doneness, rotating the sheets once. – – Transfer strips to a paper towel to drain.

In addition to my mother’s birthday it was Valentines’s Day. My partner and I don’t really do Valentine’s Day. We don’t go out, we don’t buy gifts, we don’t do all the “love” things that we really should be doing every single day. We only have one tradition. Every year for Valentine’s Day I make Chicken and Eggplant Parmigiana. It’s his favourite and really he would ask me to make it everyday if I was willing.

I have been making this Parm dish for so long that I don’t even have a recipe. Alex Guarnaschelli’s Eggplant Parm Recipe from the Food Network is probably the closest to mine so you can check it out.

Finally the last piece of the busy weekend is Family Day today. I got an extra day to do whatever, which with this cold basically meant whatever in my house because it is too cold for anything else. So of course I warmed the house with the heat of the oven and did some serious meal prep for this week’s Menu Board.