Single Mom Chronicles May 13th 2019

Wilted lettuce salad.  Sounds kind of unappetizing.  But if your kid isn’t into roughage, this salad is for you.  The ingredient list is short and cheap.  Just the way I like it.  Gramma used to make this salad after a morning of having bacon for breakfast.  She’d keep a piece or two for garnish, or not….depending on if we had any extra.  But the salad is all about the dressing, so hang onto your bacon fat!

We’ve eaten this salad with the bare minimums of lettuce, green onions, and dressing and that’s it.  For years.  But this is my blog, after all, so I thought for this purpose…I’d dress it up a bit.  I got some fantastic pea shoots and the price was right for a couple giant avocados.  Since this was the only thing we ate for dinner, I chopped nearly a pound of bacon and tossed that in.  Shallots replaced the traditional green onions and we had a surplus of eggs from the girls so I boiled them and folded those in as well.

It was fantastic.  It’s going to be hard for me to not do it again.  It was so filling!  However, as a side dish as a single mom, the plain lettuce and green onion version will never leave my repetoire.  It’s my favorite way to use up leftover bacon grease.  Gramma’s rule number one was never toss out your bacon grease.  It’s a good rule!

If you’re a single parent, this is an easy and affordable way to get some lettuce into the kids.  The dressing comes together with just three ingredients.  And it really stretches one pack of bacon and who doesn’t love that?!  A full head of red leaf lettuce is under two dollars and a bunch of green onions are less than a dollar.  With the addition of a pound of bacon under five bucks, the entire salad costs around seven bucks, even with the vinegar and sugar for the dressing….and only about two to three dollars if you leveraged that bacon at a different meal.