Baconize Your Vegetables

Every year my close girlfriends from high school organize a Friendsgiving dinner. It helps us rally our individual circuses to spend some holiday time together. Friendsgiving dinner gets bigger and bigger as our families grow. We are currently at 6 girlfriends, a few husband/boyfriends, and 13 kiddies ranging in age from 0.5 months to 12 years old. Wholly crap, that’s a huge circus!

Friendsgiving is hosted potluck style. Everyone sends a list of their meals and someone volunteers to host. Friendsgiving of 2018 introduced me to a meal that has now become a meal pep staple: brussel sprouts and bacon. It was love at first bite. I asked my friend Leidy for the recipe, she texted it, it was in my refrigerator that weekend and almost every week after. Since November of 2018 I’ve experimented with a handful of vegetable and bacon recipes. Snap peas and bacon, string beans and bacon, brussel sprouts and bacon. Bacon bacon bacon. Mmmmm bacon. I’ve never eaten more vegetables in my life!

For my vegetables and bacon recipe I use one pack of vegetables with half a pack of bacon. You can choose to use even less bacon. Maybe one day I’ll wean myself from half a pack to 1/4th pack. Not today. For breakfast I sometimes treat myself to 1-2 slices of bacon.

“A life without good food is no life at all”

Bacon is probably not a part of the weight loss friendly diet. Understandable. But as I said in the intro to this blog page, I don’t diet. I just focus on portion control because a life without bacon is no life at all. So regardless of my fitness goals, I unapologetically enjoy eating bacon. Although I enjoy bacon I do practice some form of self-control by following this mantra: bacon is season. Enjoy bacon but sparingly. Sprinkle as if it’s season and not the meal itself.

Cooking hack: I love pre-cut, pre-washed, pre-anything vegetables and sides (sweet potato cubes, cut onions, cut brussel sprouts). Pealing onions become one less hurdle to making a decent meal.

The brussel sprouts can easily be swapped with other vegetables like snap peas and string beans. I steam the vegetables if I have a lot of time. Or boil for 5-6 minutes if I’m in a time crunch. I then sauté the vegetables in the pan with drained bacon for about 3-4 minutes (keep the crunch!). Squeeze in a bit of lemon just at the end.

So that’s my hack to eating more vegetables. I definitely eat vegetables in other ways throughout the week but baconizing is the most delicious. Can you guess how many times I’ve said “bacon” in this post? Write your estimate in the comments below.