Cornbread Salad for the Weekly Cookbook Challenge – Part 2

Okay, so I should read recipes more carefully—in looking at the recipe for the original cornbread salad recipe, I see the instructions ‘coarsely crumble the cornbread into a good big bowl and let it dry for a few hours.’ So my careful slicing and cutting into cubes was definitely wasted effort. I salvaged it this morning by coarsely crumbling my nicely cubed bread into a bowl:

I then put the bacon on to fry, and while that was going on, I chopped all the veggies and made the dressing. Veggies done, bacon fried till crisp and drained on paper towel, dressing all mixed, I was good to go. First, add all the chopped veggies and bacon to the cornbread–Before:

 

And after being tossed together with my impeccably clean hands:

 

Next, pour on the dressing and mix (with an impeccably clean spoon!), place yummy portion on plate, decorate with a couple bits of reserved crispy bacon:

 

And devour. This is absolutely delicious, and definitely needs the southern cornbread to make it work. The johnnycake of my youth would utterly fail here. Unless, of course, you add it as a dessert course drizzle with melted butter and maple syrup….mmmm….getting dizzy….love that cornbread! But we’ll save that for another post…

I’ll follow up with the vegetarian version 2 later today… Oh, and here’s the recipe! Nearly forgot—and remember, for my purposes, I used half recipes so I could try both kinds of salad with one pan of cornbread!

¾ pound bacon

1 cup mayonnaise

½ cup sweet pickle relish

¼ cup juice from sweet pickle relish

1 T. sugar

2 sweet onions (Vidalia or other), finely chopped

2 green bell peppers, cored, seeded, and finely chopped

4 to 5 juicy ripe tomatoes, cut into medium-size chunks

1. Coarsely crumble the cornbread into a good big bowl and let it dry out for a few hours.
2. Cook the bacon, draining off all excess fat. “you want it cooked real brown and crispy,” Patsy says. When the bacon has cooled, crumble it coarsely and set aside.
3. Stir or whisk together the mayo, relish, relish juice and sugar. That’s your dressing. Set it aside.
4. When the crumbled cornbread has dried slightly, toss in the onions, peppers, tomatoes and crumbled bacon. Toss well, so that everything is well distributed.
5. Spoon the dressing over the top and stir thoroughly. Cover tightly and refrigerate until ready to serve. It can be made up to 24 hours in advance.

SO good…okay, a couple tweaks: First, I did a small dice rather than the finely chopped thing, because we like our veggies a little on the larger side. Tomatoes—no good ripe regular tomatoes around here yet, so I used grape tomatoes cut in quarters. And an almost tweak that was not needed—I’m used to using salt and pepper in my dressings, and I’m glad I didn’t—the salad is plenty salty enough, and doesn’t need the pepper, unless you really want it. Enjoy!