Bacon, Egg, and Spinach Salad

Hello lovely friends and happy mid-week! This week is passing quickly for me, and I hope that's the case for you too!

A local restaurant near where I live (it's Canary Square in case you're in Boston and want to check it out) serves this awesome salad that I've ordered several times. It's their "warm swiss chard and chicken salad" and it contains warm swiss chard (obviously) with fire roasted pulled chicken, pecans, a poached egg, and bacon vinaigrette. It is soooo good. Mike loves it too. What a unique combination, right? For a while now, I've thought it would be fun to make something similar at home, and then as I was reading the April issue of my Every Day with Rachael Ray magazine at the gym recently, there was a great looking recipe for a bacon, egg, and spinach salad. Seeing that recipe was the "kick in the pants" (er, the inspiration) I needed to finally get me to make my own twist on this whole "salad with an egg" thing that seems to be trending right now.

Now, I didn't follow the magazine's recipe exactly, so the ingredients here are what I actually used and not what's in the magazine. However, I found the recipe online and it's here for you in case you want to check it out! This recipe below serves two people.

Ingredients:

-7 pieces of bacon (I used the reduced sodium Whole Foods 365 brand)

-2 eggs

-1 medium onion, chopped

-1 clove garlic, minced

-3 to 4 cups spinach

Instructions:

Cook bacon however you would like (how's that for exact instructions? ha). I baked my bacon and it worked fabulously. No fuss or mess! I baked it on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper (using this method) and then let it cool and broke it into 1/2 - 1 inch pieces.

Drizzle a pan with a couple teaspoons of olive oil, and over medium heat, cook the chopped onion 5 to 7 minutes or so. Add the minced garlic about halfway through, and cook until the onion gets soft and translucent. In the meantime, fry or poach the eggs (whatever's your preference!) until done to your liking. We cooked our eggs "over medium" so they were slightly runny. When the onions are close to done, place the spinach right in the pan with the onions, and cook 1 to 2 minutes, until the spinach begins to wilt. Again, cook the spinach until it's done to your liking. You can see in the pictures below that we didn't let our spinach wilt entirely, just a little. Add the already cooked bacon pieces to the pan, and to serve, place desired amount of the spinach, onion, bacon mixture on a plate and top with an egg! Sprinkle with salt and/or pepper, if desired.

Simple as that. :)

There was no need for any sort of dressing on this salad, in our opinion. The flavors of the bacon and cooked onions and garlic lent plenty of flavor to the dish without the need for dressing. However, you could definitely add dressing if you'd like.

You could also use less bacon than I used. I actually didn't think we'd eat all the bacon that I made, but we did! So, that was about 3.5 bacon strips each (they were pretty small though).

To go along with our spinach salad, we had deeelicious roasted sweet potatoes and When Pigs Fly bread. This was one of the simplest and most delicious dinners I've made recently. Loved it!

I realize this salad may not look like the most appetizing meal in the world, but trust me, it's awesome. You could easily add chicken to this, and you could also change it up by using kale or swiss chard in place of the spinach.

Writing about this dish is making me want to make it again...ASAP!!!

:)

Oh, and don't forget to head on over to my recent post about the giveaway to win an amazing Dagoba organic chocolate bar!!