So much bacon. So little time.

Though spending my Thanksgiving eating my way through Dallas with my family might not be the best thing for my health, it’s still probably better for my overall health than what I’ve been eating for the last month: all bacon, all the time.

On special occasions, my grandma always makes this fantastic and simple spinach salad–spinach, mushrooms, hardboiled eggs, red onion, and bacon, with a homemade poppyseed dressing. So naturally, when my roommates and I were planning a small dinner party about a month ago, my contribution was–you guessed it–spinach salad.

Our guests were supposed to arrive at 7, so at 5:30, we were all running around like maniacs in the small organic grocery store around the corner, buying overpriced ingredients at the last minute. I had already made a game-time decision to skip the eggs, because I am impatient and always screw up my hardboiled eggs. All I needed was the bacon. Let me tell you, organic grocery stories do not have bacon bits unless you want tempeh bacon bits. But, inexplicably, they did have two-pound packages of bacon. Done. Purchased.

Flash forward to the party, three glasses of wine and a brick of cheese later. Did I even remember to make the salad? No. Two minutes before our chili was supposed to be done, I threw together the salad ingredients, and quickly cooked two strips of bacon in the microwave to crumble on top. Did anyone eat the salad? Nope. Unless you count me, every day, over the next week. After the party was over, I looked in the fridge at my 1.75 lb package of bacon. What the fuck am I going to do with all of this bacon? I decided to wrap it up, put it in the freezer and think about it later.

I don’t like to waste food. This is why end up having a lot of weird stir-frys for dinner–green beans, chicken, craisins, and lemon, anyone? Over the next few weeks, I made it a mission to use up the bacon in my freezer. You know how really healthy people ‘just add a little flaxseed’ to everything? I was like that, but with bacon. It was a period of self-discovery. And cholesterol. The most important lessons I learned:

1) It’s OK to reconceptualize your idea of ‘bacon’. The trick to using frozen bacon is really extricating it from the giant slab of fat that it’s become. You can’t just peel off a strip. The technique I found the most useful in the end was going at the slab vertically with a steak knife, perforating a line down the whole slab and then levering the piece off of the greater slab. Bacon defrosts pretty quickly, so after you’ve cut down the mass of frozen bacon, you can split apart the individual strips and cook it pretty easily.

2) Cook the bacon first. In my first pasta-and-veggie dish with bacon, I made the mistake of cooking my vegetables and the bacon together. I wanted the peppers and onions to ‘absorb the flavor’. And did they ever. Gross.

3) Keep it simple. I tried to make ‘a sauce’ a few times, and toss my vegetables with lemon juice before adding bacon. This doesn’t work. Everything still tastes like bacon. (Or lemony bacon. Delicious? Right.) One week, I made bean and bacon soup and the only thing I added was some shredded cheddar cheese and crushed red pepper on top. It was time to embrace the bacon.

(I was going to make garlic bread with this, but then I got lazy.)

This was my favorite bacon dish, adapted from Real Simple. Purple cauliflower, green manzanilla olives, and red onions, sauteed in olive oil with herbs de Provence and garlic; later, tossed with parmesean cheese, Ezekiel pasta, and, of course, bacon.

I’m on a little bit of a bacon hiatus at the moment. It’ll do a body good. Too bad last Sunday my roommate and her boyfriend bought another whole pack of bacon to make a dish for dinner. “You’re going to get up tomorrow and make a bacon sandwich, right?” she asked him. Probably a good move, because I’ve sort of run out of ideas of things to cook with bacon.