Southern Wilted Lettuce Salad

I made the last wilted lettuce salad for a while. Everything is bolting, growing lax, sending up flower heads that will become seeds. It was time to eat what was left, pull the plants out for the chickens, and reseed. In reality, it should have been resown several weeks before this batch began to bolt, but ya know...

My hubby would eat wilted lettuce every week. I would eat it maybe once a month. Let's just say that despite it being "salad" it is not the healthiest thing for you. Oh, that bad ole delicious bacon and bacon grease! But I have figured out how to use less grease and amp up the flavor. Some wilted salads are greasy and one-note, this one was sprightly and full of texture.

My salad had all kinds of greens from Bloomsdale Longstanding Spinach, to Buttercrunch lettuce, to a delightful salad mustard that came in a mixed pack. I also picked some peppery nasturtium leaves from my herb bed. I ended up with seven kinds of greens in the mix. Plus fresh green onions. The radishes have long passed, but they were great in the first salads.

 The first thing I did, after rinsing and drying the salad, was fry five slices of bacon. I cut them into what the French call "lardon", which is basically matchsticks. I have the butcher thick-cut our bacon, and if I were to cook it enough to crumble it would be nearing charcoal. But lardon cook up beautifully crisp but still meaty.

Then scoop out the bacon to a bowl and let the bacon grease cool while you make supper. Lots of people try to go ahead and add their vinegar while the oil is hot. That's a good way to get a spatter burn! 

 I have the bacon in one bowl and the three big green onions chopped in another. To the onions I added 1/2 cup of apple cider vinegar, and four Tbsp of a balsamic vinaigrette that I find at Aldi. It has a slight sweetness, plus the smoky tang of the balsamic. I find that adding it gives a whole different depth of flavor and helps me to not need as much bacon grease to add taste. Plain cider vinegar seems very harsh and unpleasant to me, but the balsamic dressing mellows it out. I also mixed in a 1/2 tsp of both salt and pepper, and four tsp of white sugar. When you have the rest of supper ready, or when the oil has cooled down, you can add the onion and vinegar mixture to the pan. Wilted lettuce needs to be eaten the moment it is made, or it will be a cold, floppy mess.

 I didn't have quite enough bacon grease, so I added a Tbsp from the jar I keep in the fridge. Bacon grease gets a bad rap, but it is amazing how much flavor it imparts. I add a Tbsp to vegetable oil when frying chicken, and add it to the pan when cooking off "aromatics", vegetable that are used to season a dish. I was always extolling its virtues in my cooking class, until one girl begged her mother to let her have her own jar of bacon grease in the fridge! I had to laugh at that- here I am, helping clog the arteries of another generation! ;)

Heat your bacon grease, onions and vinegars to a boil. I put a thin layers of greens in my serving bowl, pour over a bit of the hot mix, while tossing with tongs. Add more greens, toss, and continue. Otherwise you will often get a top layer that has heated to mush (yuck!), and underneath layers that aren't even touched. Pour your bowl of cooked bacon over the top and gently toss in. This would be the time to add thinly sliced radishes if you have them. They add a welcome crunch.

A terribly blurry picture, but you can see that the pork chops did not make it to my plate. I would rather have sides and bread than meat most days. The salad had so many sturdy, textured greens that it didn't turn to mush. It wilted, like desired, and had such a great variety of flavors that it was my favorite of the season.

Do you see the lovely yellow flowers on top of the salad? They were from the mustard greens and they were delicious! I grow regular mustard greens for cooking and these were not the same. My Seven Top Mustard greens are so filled with bitters that they have to be boiled and drained, twice. The mustard that came in the mixed pack of mesclun is a wonderful tasting green that is perfect eaten uncooked. I loved it so much that I let it make flower heads to eat, and then turn to seed.

I pulled the plant and brought it in to dry. Now I will be able to harvest the seeds from the pods and grow it again next year. It was that good! You also see a fluffy purple flower on the salad. That is a chive blossom. Chive looks like a grass and tastes like a cross between onion and garlic. I love it and used it in lots of things. I fully intended to eat the flower with my salad, but wow! It was incredibly hot. So, that little guy turned out to just be garnish. And there you have it, the last wilted lettuce before the scorch of summer has us doing the wilting!