Wilted Lettuce Salad

You will never have too much lettuce or greens if your family likes this dish!

6 slices of bacon
1/2 c. sliced green onion
1/4 c. vinegar
4 tsp. sugar
8 c. leaf lettuce torn bite size

optional garnish:
6 radishes thinly sliced
1 hard cooked egg chopped

Fry bacon, drain. To the grease add vinegar, sugar, onion and crumbled bacon. Heat until hot, pour over lettuce. Garnish with radishes and egg.

There's lots of variations to this recipe. We prepare all ingredients in a spaghetti pot. Then throw in a mess of greens and toss until they have just 'wilted' down. Make extra-it doesn't go very far!

why haven't you given us a "drooling" emoticon yet?

Per your request, I've been looking all over for a 'crazy lady' emoticon. I'll add 'drooling' to the want list!

Thanks for the recipe, Boffer! I have lots of lettuce coming in and can't eat enough salads. This is the perfect change. I think my hubby will even like it (what's not to like about bacon).

Thanks for the recipe. My grandma used to make wilted lettuce all the time and I was just telling my wife about it the other day. Now I can fix some for her.

I've never heard of that before! What sort of lettuce is best? And does it feed a lot of people? 8 cups of lettuce sounds so much to me but I suppose it wilts down a lot?
I might try a small portion first You eat it with other food do you? Like a vegetable...

martha wrote:why haven't you given us a "drooling" emoticon yet?

Just for you!

With thanks to Wyldflower for finding it

Icemaiden wrote:I've never heard of that before! What sort of lettuce is best? And does it feed a lot of people? 8 cups of lettuce sounds so much to me but I suppose it wilts down a lot?
I might try a small portion first You eat it with other food do you? Like a vegetable...

I don't have a lettuce preference. Whatever is green, works! Lettuce, spinach, beet leaves, etc. We serve it as a vegetable.

It doesn't go far at all. 8 cups of uncompressed lettuce wouldn't be enough for my wife and me (super-sized portions!). It's a great recipe for people like me who get excited in early spring and plant too much lettuce at once! Also, our grocery store occasionally has great prices on lettuce when they are overstocked.

Wilted lettuce is a spring staple on dining tables around here, and everyone has their own special way of making it. Most folks here use leaf lettuce for it, - Black-seeded Simpson is usually planted just for this purpose because the tender leaves wilt quickly. We just pour the hot grease mixture over the leaves and stir quickly - it wilts quite nicely without being put in the pan and heated.

My FIL used to like his with just bacon grease poured over a bowl of lettuce and green onions, and nothing else. My grandmother's recipe was much like yours except she used no sugar, and she added a little tomato juice. In fact, I've never eaten it with sugar added. I'll have to try that sometime, although it sounds almost as foreign to me as adding sugar to my cornbread. (Shudder!)

Thanks for letting people know about one of the joys of spring.

Ander (who just yesterday was eyeing her leaf lettuce, drooling over its future destiny)

I just finished a lunch of wilted spinach salad with extra bacon and egg. My recipe is identical to boffer's except I only use 1 tsp sugar. The spinach reduces by a half, so I imagine lettuce would reduce even further. Wish I had thought of using lettuce when I had a glut of it a few weeks ago.

The sugar just tames the sourness. My wife follows the recipe; I don't use hardly any. Adjust to taste.

boffer wrote:Per your request, I've been looking all over for a 'crazy lady' emoticon. I'll add 'drooling' to the want list!

OK, I've never heard of this before. Doesn't all that bacon grease make it a little unhealthy? Or, do all those greens kind of even things out? In any case, it sounds good because anything goes with bacon, right?

There's not really that much grease, plus bacon grease is half monounsaturated and half saturated fat -- all the good kinds, in spite of what big pharma wants us to believe about the latter.

Look at pictures of folks in the first part of last century -- they all ate bacon fat and lard but you'll see very few obese folks overall. It was the introduction of transfats and high emphasis on polyunsaturated fat with the addition of extra carbohydrates and sugar that led to the current health crisis. OK climbing down off my soapbox now....

Year before last, coffee was bad for us. Last year it was good for us. Who knows anymore? Moderation is the only thing that makes sense to me.

If you don't want to use bacon grease, you can use olive oil instead. Any hot oil will wilt the lettuce leaves - I suppose you could even just heat a vinegar mix if you wanted to eliminate the fat altogether, but where's the fun in that?

Belfry bat, make room on your soapbox for me. We render our lard from our own pigs just like my grandmothers did - nothing hydrogenated for us! (And my grandmothers lived to be 90 and 104.)

Don't get me wrong, I'm definately not the health nut type. Since I haven't heard of this dish before it struck me as odd to add bacon fat. I will need to try it though but since I didn't plant lettuce, I'll have to get some from the store. Oh, I know, when we have our family favorite summertime meal (BLT and corn on the cob) that would be a good time to try it.
Boffer I agree, moderation is the key... Steve

ander217 wrote:
Belfry bat, make room on your soapbox for me. We render our lard from our own pigs just like my grandmothers did - nothing hydrogenated for us! (And my grandmothers lived to be 90 and 104.)

Welcome up -- plenty of room on my soap box! I used to render lard, but no longer have access to pig fat, so now get steer fat from the processors when friends slaughter and process that into tallow. Not as good tasting as lard, but does the job. I also make soap from it.

And Boffer, I agree completely -- moderation in all things except chocolate.

We can still buy lard here right out at the grocery store. It's called saindoux (sane-doo), so it sounds much prettier than lard!

The bacon and the vinegar just taste good with the leaves...I make spinach by lightly sauteeing some garlic in extra virgin olive oil (quickly -- 30-45 seconds is enough -- make sure you remove it from the heat before it starts to burn) -- then remove the garlic and toss in a pile of washed fresh spinach....I toss it till it's coated and just begins to wilt. It's the best way of making spinach I've found.

boffer wrote:Year before last, coffee was bad for us. Last year it was good for us. Who knows anymore? Moderation is the only thing that makes sense to me.

Yes, but Boffer, can you really use the words "bacon" and "moderation" in the same sentence?

And, by the way -



I could not have asked for a better drooling emoticon - thanks Boffer and Wyldflower!

LaFee wrote:We can still buy lard here right out at the grocery store.

They sell lard in stores here, too, but everything I've found on the shelves nowadays is hydrogenated. (Why they hydrogenate lard is beyond me.) That turns it into a trans fat just as unhealthy as the rest of them. That's why I render my own. If I could find pure, unhydrogenated lard in the store, I wouldn't go to that trouble.

I agree with Belfry Bat that pure lard (non-hydrogenated) contains a healthy type of fat, and doesn't deserve the bad rep it has received. Bacon grease contains nitrates, - (or is it nitrites? Or both? I always forget.) I won't try to make a case that it's healthy, but it tastes so good that I'm willing to risk it now and then, (while hearing Boffer singing the Moderation song in my head.)

ander217 wrote:

LaFee wrote:We can still buy lard here right out at the grocery store.

They sell lard in stores here, too, but everything I've found on the shelves nowadays is hydrogenated. (Why they hydrogenate lard is beyond me.) That turns it into a trans fat just as unhealthy as the rest of them. That's why I render my own. If I could find pure, unhydrogenated lard in the store, I wouldn't go to that trouble.

Fully hydrogenation is not a transfat only partially hydrogenated (partially=trans= stopped part way through the process). I use Armour brand and inquired to make sure the fat they add is fully hyrdrogenated, and it is. It actually only accounts for 2% of the total. The reason it is added is to make it a bit firmer at room temps. Like you, I wish they wouldn't dicker with it at all, but at least it fully and not partially hydrogenated.

For those of us who don't eat meat for whatever reason just add a little liquid smoke to olive oil for a simular taste. Just a little like one tsp.

Nettie

Thanks, Belfry Bat, I didn't know that. I thought all hydrogenation was bad.

I agree, I wish they wouldn't add any at all, but if it's only 2% that's not so bad. Have you seen the article in this week's Scientific American about fats versus processed carbs? You might find it interesting.

Nettie, thanks for your tip, too. I'm a meat-eater, but I'll pass the info along to a friend who is vegan.

I've made wilted lettuce lots of times using just olive oil, red wine vinegar, sliced green onions, and salt and pepper. I heat it all in the skillet and pour it over the leaves, and then stir quickly. Sometimes I add a little tomato juice for variation.

Add me to that soapbox too !! I can't wait to try wilted lettuce!