Weekly Cooking Report January 18: Wedge Salad

Last week I tasked you with making a whole duck meal, but that is a very big, very rich meal. This week lets go a little smaller and ostensibly healthier. As healthy as anything with a lot of bacon and blue cheese can be. 

To my money the Wedge Salad is the best salad in the world. And it has the advantage of being both a whole meal if you do it right. Or it can be side dish that you use to support someone else making the main meal. Either way it's delicious and easy. 

Now, this here recipe goes all in on how to make it, including making your own blue cheese dressing. Yeah, you don't need to go that far but it's here for reference. 

The shopping run for this is easy: A head of iceberg lettuce. A pint of cherry tomatoes. A jar of blue cheese dressing and hopefully a container of blue cheese crumbles. A rasher of bacon. a bag of croutons. As usual you may have a bunch of this in the house. 

Got all that? OK, get the bacon cooking. If you aren't comfortable with cooking bacon on the stovetop in a frying pan, you can use this technique to make it in the microwave. This may be better as it is uniformly crispy bacon. If you really, really, don't want to cook bacon, by a bag of 'bacon bits', but real bacon is much better. If this is meant to be a meal, use 3 slices per person. 

While the bacon cooks and drains, whack the lettuce head on its root to break it out, remove it, and then cut the head into at least 4 wedges, but otherwise one for each person eating, up to say, 8. You can also gauge this by how much people like lettuce. Then take about 4-5 cherry tomatoes per person, slice them in half. 

Pour on some of the blue cheese dressing. Then add the tomatoes. Then the blue cheese crumbles to taste. Crumble the bacon over the salad. Finally right before serving add the croutons and a little more dressing. Serve to a grateful family. 

The richness of the bacon, the tang from the cheese, the bright acidity of the tomatoes, the creaminess of the dressing against the crispness of the lettuce and the crunch of the croutons... it's nigh unto perfect. Enjoy!