Day 236: Bacon, Tomato and Avocado Salad with Pesto Dressing
I used to hate avocadoes. Now there isn’t anything about them I don’t love. Wait, there is: the fact that you have to bend to their schedules. That is, when you need a perfectly ripe avocado for a recipe right now, good luck. And when you buy them hard, once they arrive at the stage of perfect soft-firm ripeness, you have about a 24 hour window to come up with a use for them.
We had two that came into their own in tandem, so Mike made some guacamole for later, and I made a salad with tomato, purple onion, flat-leaf Italian parsley (I love having this stuff growing in my garden), avocado and bison bacon – a very lean, salty bacon that comes in thin strips, yet texturally resembles dark back bacon rather than the strip bacon that comes with bacon & eggs. (From Valta Bison in Ramsay.) I shook up a jar with about two parts olive oil to one of bottled pesto to drizzle overtop. I suspect this combo would translate very well into a sandwich. Bacon-tomato-avocado, with some pesto stirred into the mayo? You think?
It was fantastic, although I did find myself picking through the salad for little salty slabs of bacon and soft, melting avocado. And next time, I think I’ll opt for thinly sliced spinach instead of stronger-tasting Italian parsley.
(I often wonder how different this blog would have been had I written it 10 years ago. Of course, there weren’t blogs 10 years ago, were there?)
It’s interesting that you ask about what this blog would have been like if you’d written it 10 years ago since, according to Michael Pollan, our eating habits have been changing once a generation for the last three generations, something he says is historically unprecedented and due to the rise of what he dubs nutritionism and food marketing. Interesting, no?
Yes. That, and I went to the bar a lot.
Ah Julie, your response is one of the reasons I love your blog so much. The food is great, but those one line zingers are even better.