This is my version of Spinach Salad with Hard Boiled Eggs and Bacon. The bacon and egg are both mandatory for this classic salad, but I add a bit of red onion and a few mushrooms when I have them. Not everyone does, but that is the beauty of salad. It can be personalized to your own taste yet you can still enjoy the classic flavour combination.

Seasonal Strategy

I like to take a seasonal approach to cooking, just as a general guide. Of course we can buy spinach year round but gardeners know that spinach is an early spring vegetable. I’m a gardener so spring reminds me of spinach, and that reminds me all the spinach recipes I don't make in the winter. This Spinach Salad with Hard Boiled Eggs and Bacon is one of them.

Individual Spinach Salad with Hard Boiled Eggs -photo credit Jim Little

Organize For Success - Spinach Salad

You might think there is no organizing required to make a salad and in many ways that’s true. But what makes you serve the same recipes over and over...until you’re sick of them?

Not organizing.

Here are two tips to stay organized and keep adding variety to your everyday salads.

Keep salad dressing in the fridge: Dressing lasts for weeks, even months, so make it and label it. I like to have two or three homemade dressings in my fridge at any given time. Sometimes as many as five.
Ready Ingredients: Think ahead and boil some eggs for lunch plus extra for this salad. If you cook bacon on the weekend, save a few pieces and hide them in the freezer. Then you can whip up this salad in no time.

Perfect Hard Boiled Eggs

Eggs are natures’ fast food and I’ve always got them in my fridge. For years I would open a cookbook and look up the instructions for hard boiling eggs, just to be sure. Eventually I wrote them onto a recipe card and taped it to the inside of a cupboard door near the stove. I know to put the eggs in the same pot I use for rice so this is what I wrote on the card.

Perfect Hard Boiled Eggs
Cover with cold water with a few drops of vinegar
Bring to a boil then use 1 of 2 methods:
1) Simmer x 12 minutes, NO LID.
2) Lid on. Heat off. Sit x 20 minutes.

The goal is perfectly cooked yolks with no gray around the edge of the yolk. I like the NO LID method in winter or if I'm in a hurry. In warmer weather I like the LID ON method but they both work for me.

Get The Tools

You don’t need a lot of tools for salad making but you need some basics. My list includes:

An awesome knife, I like my 10-inch Chef’s knife
A sturdy extra large cutting board
I use my immersion blender to fully emulsify oil and vinegar. Just as often I simply use a whisk to make a quick dressing in a small bowl or measure the oil and vinegar directly into a jar and shake vigorously.
Both salad dressing bottles and 1-cup Mason jars are great for storing salad dressing.
An egg slicer is one of those tools I don't use often but it has a spot in a drawer and I'm happy I have it.
A gorgeous wooden salad bowl or a nice glass platter will be used over and over to serve all kinds of salads so are a good investment.

I'd love to hear in the comments below if you have some salads that you only make at a certain time of the year.

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