Since it is summer, I’ve been posting a lot of salad options that include bacon lately. Salads are not only refreshing, but can be very healthy, filling and extremely delicious. Now the question is: How can we include more bacon flavour into our wonderful salads? Well, we’ve already included some pieces of bacon and we’ve included the bacon fat in multiple dressings. What else is there? How ‘bout them croutons…

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A great deal of bacon’s appeal comes from its flavour, of course. The wonderful saltiness of bacon makes it a great addition to complex dishes, and it’s distinct smoky flavour also allows bacon to stand on its own and assert it’s flavour identity no matter what it is paired with. But there’s so much more to bacon than it’s mere tastiness. While many bacon flavourings attempt to capture the essence of bacon’s flavour profile, and many succeed nobly, there are some elements that make bacon wonderful that cannot be captured by it’s mere taste. It’s also the texture of bacon that makes it one of the most delicious things in the entire world.

The crunchiness of bacon is one of the best part of the entire bacon-eating process. The satisfying bite of a crispy rasher in your mouth is one of the great culinary pleasures of the world. Bacon’s trademark crunch is one of the things that makes is so irresistible, and contrasting the

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Bacon is one of those foods that seems to pair perfectly with just about everything. A delicious cupcake or sweet donut? Even better with some bacon! A fresh and tasty salad made of the very best seasonal veggies? Bacon goes great with that as well! Having a lovely roast chicken, Sunday dinner with the family? Wrap that chicken in bacon and it’ll be even more fantastic.

But there are are some foods that match so well with bacon that they deserve a special mention. And for today’s edition of Bacon Love Friday, we are going to highlight the culinary love affair between bacon and shrimp. I’ve adored seafood since I was a small child, and shrimp has always been my favourite. From crispy breaded and deep fried shrimp to lemony grilled shrimp, shrimp dipped in butter and shrimp as part of a seafood salad – whatever the form it came in, I was sure to love it. And wouldn’t you know, but shrimp happens to pair perfectly with another of my favourite foods of all time: bacon.

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It’s been hot in Toronto lately. I usually wouldn’t mind so much, but I do not have air conditioning and the humidity is really getting to me. There is no way I’ll be turning on my stove or my oven for the next week and a half. It’s just too hot. What’s a great way to cool down, besides a dip in a pool or a nice cold shower? A summer salad, that’s what. I’ve explored some various salads through my time here, and this is just another addition. This salad doesn’t have any lettuce though – broccoli is its replacement. Nice crunchy broccoli with a sweet and creamy dressing paired with some dried fruit, nuts and bacon make for a great cooldown side.

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You’ve seen the bacon and mushroom combination before, I know. I continue to make the connection because there are so many ways you can combine these fantastic flavours. I’ve shown you sides, toppings, sauces and risottos. Now let’s make some stuffed mushrooms. Removing the stems from the base of the Mushrooms gives you the majority of the substance you’ll include in the stuffing. I also recommend that you chop up one whole mushroom for stuffing, as well. I didn’t and I ran out of stuffing before I ran out of mushrooms to stuff! So, if you buy 10 mushrooms, chop up one of those ten with the stems, and stuff 9 mushrooms. Cool?! Let’s go.

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Here at the Republic of Bacon, we do all that we can to support up and coming bacon entrepreneurs – or bacontrepreneurs, as we like to call them. The reason that bacon occupies such a hallowed place in popular culture (other than its sheer deliciousness, of course) is the fact that smart, savvy, and creative bacon loving folks out keep innovating new and exciting ways to prepare, consume and celebrate this food.

We eagerly seek out new bacon products and projects, like just about anything the great people are J&D’s Foods rolls out or any tasty treat The Baconery cook up in their magical kitchens, and give them as much a boost as we can. When it comes to celebrating inventiveness, we want to encourage all the bacon lovers out there to keep creating and coming up with new things.

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It’s hot. I mean really hot. Middle of July kind of hot. And guess what? I don’t have any air conditioning. There’s only one proper way to cool down: Ice cream. We all know it, we all love it. The feeling we get as we hear the ice cream man drive by takes us back to our magical childhood when we’d chase that truck for miles down the street with the change our parents gave us falling out of our pockets. Let’s recreate that feeling but class it up a little. Let’s add some grilled pineapple, throw it on some angel-food cake and of course pop some crispy caramelized bacon on top.

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I know. Sounds sexy, right? All those Italian words strung in a row. But don’t be fooled. It’s just a salad; a really, really delicious salad. Finocchio, more commonly known as fennel, has a distinct licorice taste when it’s raw, but after you grill it, the sweetness absolutely shines. Its pairing with oranges is extremely traditional and a salad is more than common. Let’s kick it up a notch with some pine nuts, thin sliced red onion and bacon. Impress your girl or man with this sexy salad.

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Ah, the bacon cheeseburger. Few foods exist that are quite as perfect as this edible wonder. I personally like my bacon cheeseburgers with lettuce, tomato, ketchup, mustard and mayo – a relatively simple combination, unchanged since I was a little girl, but there is something about that flavour combination that sends me right to my happy place. It’s one of the most quintessential summer dishes, the first thing I toss on the barbecue on that first really warm day of the year.

Bacon cheeseburgers have also been a stable of the fast food industry since the very beginning, and the temptation to pull over and go through the drive-thru to pick one up as a midweek treat is something I indulge in often – admittedly, maybe a little too often.

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I’m back. The kitchen is treating me nicely again. Because it’s treating me so nicely, I’m going to treat you to a trio of balconized flatbreads. Yes, that’s right: Three different flavour combinations. You could consider them almost an appetizer, main and dessert!I’d like to call it an apology for that flatbread failure on Tuesday. You know where I only created the toppings because my flatbread just wouldn’t work out for me.

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