Bacon Vinaigrette is next up in rotation for The Summer of the Salad. This post is about the vinaigrette, but you can’t make Bacon Vinaigrette without first frying some bacon. No, not just a few strips of bacon. A whole pound of bacon! This recipe calls for 1/2 cup of rendered bacon fat. The bacon I use, North Country Smokehouse bacon, is very meaty and doesn’t contain sugar. A good thing, in that it’s flavorful and satisfying, so a couple of strips on the side of your plate are enough. It’s not such a good thing, in that it take a whole pound of bacon when what you’re really after is bacon fat for this vinaigrette. Use whatever bacon you typically buy, but if the brand you use isn’t terribly lean, you may not need a whole pound. Also, if your brand contains sugar, the sugar will caramelize, so you’ll want to strain the rendered fat to remove the blackened bits. What you do with the bacon at that point is up to you.

So, back to The Summer of the Salad. Our garden is filled with spinach in June, so we’ll be eating spinach every day until it’s gone. It’s like asparagus season – get it while you can. Spinach is one of the first things I plant in the spring. It’s nearly mature by the time I’m setting out the seedlings from the greenhouse, so I simply intercrop, placing the seedlings between the rows of spinach. The spinach acts like a living mulch and I just harvest enough for our meal each day. If we can’t eat all of the spinach before it starts to bolt, I’ll blanch and freeze it, but that probably won’t be necessary. We’ll eat lots of spinach salad. Today it’s spinach with cucumbers, mushrooms, tomatoes, and shallots – and Bacon Vinaigrette, of course!