Salad Day's

Bacon on the burner

Bacon after the oven

 Remember the bacon? Well here we are Tuesday and  in preparation for the Salad presentation on Thursday.  I needed to first get my bacon done. At this point it has been curing about ten days in the fridge. The question was should I smoke it or try a different method. Well since we eat smoked bacon all the time, so do something different. 

Mango-Bacon Salad

A couple of tablespoons of oil in a roasting pan, some salt and pepper was sprinkled liberally over the fatty side of the bacon and seared. In the meantime. chopped up an onion, celery, carrot and smashed a few cloves of garlic. pulled the bacon out and added the veggie. Sauteed them for a few minutes and added the bacon and 2 cups of chicken stock. Brought the stock up to a boil, and placed the it in an oven set at 350 for an hour. In the meantime prepped the remaining items for the salads. My first salad needed to be a tossed salad. I chose to do a spring mix, grilled mango, bacon, and some type of candied nut and a pomegranate molasses vinaigrette. My bonded salad a curried chicken, bacon celery, toasted walnut and black grape mix. The composed salad a fried green tomato, bacon, roasted Roma tomatoes, a slice of mozzarella cheese and a drizzle of Serrano-tomatillo vinaigrette.
I really didn't know what to expect this bacon to turn out. but so I let it cool and put in the fridge until Thursday where I had to worry about it then.

Curried Chicken-Bacon Salad

 Thursday dawned bright and beautiful, by the afternoon we were expecting the worst with Hurricane Earl supposedly hitting the shores of Virginia. ODU shut down by noon as well as WHRO said don't come in tomorrow. But TCC persevered and kept it's doors open.

Fried green tomato, bacon, Roma tomato stack

I was a little worried about this bacon. It was of course not looking like bacon that we all knew. It was looking like ham, but tasting like bacon so I decided to treat it like ham. I sliced off a good portion of it and just pan fried it to give some color. I then grilled the mangoes, pulled together all the ingredients for the chicken salad and tossed the curry mayo over, created my stack of tomatoes and bacon, and threw on the cashew-sesame brickle over the grilled mango and bacon, added my pomegranate vinaigrette, and presented my plates with what seemed like thirty other salads to the group of judges. Really they were all successful. I am proud of my fellow students because while I was having a meltdown over this bacon, they were creating smoked duck, brined shrimp, duck confit etc. Annette smoked her duck. I am not a duck fan, and neither is she, but I tell you the salad she made with the strawberries was mmm,  mmm, good.
It was wonderful to see you can take a simple salad and create masterpieces I will remember for a while.