Cured Meat

I couldn’t do this book without including a blue cheese and bacon burger; the combination of a juicy burger, crisp, smoky bacon, and sharp and tangy blue cheese is just too good. You can top this burger with crumbled blue cheese or you can do what I often do and spoon some hot Blue Cheese Sauce (page 110) over the finished burger. Serve it with warm Homemade Potato Chips (page 98) and extra sauce for dipping; it’s insanely delicious. (See photograph on page 2.)

Cobb salads occupy a delicious middle ground between the decadent (hello bacon and blue cheese!) and the virtuous (lean turkey, and it is a salad after all). Whichever side you land on, there is no denying how awesome the mixture of tangy blue cheese, salty bacon, creamy avocados, ripe tomatoes, and crisp romaine lettuce is. It’s not hard to imagine how good those ingredients would taste not tossed with cubes of cold roasted turkey, but atop a hot and juicy turkey burger. It makes perfect sense to me!

I admit it, my roots are just about as city slicker as they come. Still, there’s a part of me that identifies with the cowboy mentality of the West. I once went to a rodeo in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and one of the things that I took away from that experience was the idea for this burger; it just seems like perfect rodeo fare. While in my mind’s eye the Cheyenne burger is best devoured at that rodeo or maybe while sitting around a campfire, I think its layers of smoked cheddar, spicy barbecue sauce, and crispy fried onions would bring out the cowboy in anyone, anywhere. Feeling extra adventurous? Add a couple slices of crisp bacon to the mix.

There are some mornings—and they usually come after a long night—when all I can think about is a breakfast sandwich piled high with eggs, bacon, and cheese. Add a side of hash browns and I might as well be in heaven. Given my love of a good breakfast sandwich, it was only a matter of time before I decided to move that sandwich out of breakfast-only terrain and into a burger. Breakfast, lunch, dinner . . . now I can get my fix any time. I prefer my egg cooked over easy because I love how the yolk runs out and saturates the burger after the first bite, but if that’s not your thing, you should of course cook the eggs according to your preference.

I’ve encountered many people who are shocked that I eat real pork bacon, being that I’ve kept off fifty-five pounds for close to twenty years. Others are shocked that I include it in my cookbooks. The interesting thing to realize is that center-cut bacon—real pork bacon that’s 35 to 40 percent leaner than other pork bacon—is often as lean as most turkey bacon, yet it tastes like real bacon because it is. The flavor is much stronger than turkey bacon and doesn’t have that turkey aftertaste many brands of turkey bacon do. When buying fish, I often opt for frozen individually wrapped fillets. They’re usually fresher than those I find at the fish counter, and I buy them when they go on sale so I can always have some handy in my freezer.

Yes, a bacon cheeseburger. If you buy 96% lean beef and reduced-fat bacon pieces, you’re good to go! Do note, if you’re a fan of BBQ bacon cheeseburgers, just swap out the ketchup in this recipe for your favorite barbecue sauce. It will add about 10 calories but save you around 15 mg sodium. Look for the bacon pieces near the croutons and other salad ingredients in your favorite grocery store. Or, if you love them as much as I do, head to Costco and buy them in a big bag. Just store them in your refrigerator and you’ll have them on hand to curb a bacon craving with less guilt.