Caesar Salad with Bacon and Brussels Sprouts

Looking for a hearty main dish salad? This is it! You begin by making a creamy Caesar dressing with garlic and lemon juice. The dressing is tossed with crispy bacon, fried capers, browned Brussels Sprouts, shaved Parmesan cheese, and two types of lettuce. Usually Justin isn't a big fan of having salad for dinner, but he was thoroughly satisfied after eating this dinner.

 LESSON LEARNED: Fry the capers and Brussels Sprouts in the same pan you cooked the bacon. It creates less dishes to clean later.

Recipe for Caesar Salad with Bacon and Brussels Sprouts

Spinach & Bacon Risotto

I think that making risotto is magical. You start with hard, little nuggets of rice, add chicken stock combined with lots of stirring, and end up with creamy puffed-up rice pillows. This dish sounds fancy, but with a little bit of time, you can make this dish very easily. It starts with the rice. In fact, my husband asked "Did you use a special kind of rice?" and I answered "Yep, I used arborio rice!". If you are not familiar with this type of rice, the best way to describe it is a short, fat rice. You can easily find this in any grocery store.

After choosing the correct rice, the next step is stirring. This is the most time-intensive part of the dish and the recipe here is for a "quick" risotto (it only takes 20 minutes of stirring compared to upwards of 45 minutes in a more traditional risotto). I started by cooking bacon until crisp, removing the bacon and part of the bacon fat, sauteing onion/garlic in a little of the leftover bacon fat, toasting the rice, deglazing the pan with some wine (that's just getting all the brown bits off the bottom of the pan), and slowly adding warm chicken stock to the pan. This is where the stirring begins! You constantly stir the rice and add stock once the previous stock cooks out. As you stir, this develops the starch in the rice and this is what makes the dish creamy. I would highly suggest stirring while enjoying a glass of wine! I certainly did!

Once you have used all the chicken stock, stir in some butter and Parmesan cheese. I then added some chopped fresh spinach and tasted the dish for salt. After I plated it, I added some more cheese for good measure. Here's a bonus: we found out that this dish is WONDERFUL as leftovers for lunch!

LESSON LEARNED: Slowly adding stock and stirring is the key to good risotto.

Recipe for Spinach & Bacon Risotto