RECIPE: Beat end-of-summer heat with simple wedge salad

Of all the hearty, meal-sized salads out there, wedge salads are some of my favorites. Crisp, cool iceberg lettuce, creamy and tangy blue cheese dressing, smoky bacon and sweet and juicy tomatoes are an unbeatable combination. And the salad is not particularly difficult to adapt to a 5:30 Challenge recipe; all that really needs tweaking is the dressing.

Most blue cheese dressings combine a trio of creamy ingredients — buttermilk, mayonnaise and sour cream — with the cheese, which makes it impossible to include the remaining critical salad ingredients without going over the five-ingredient limit. Instead, strip down the dressing to its basics, buttermilk and blue cheese, and deliberately mash the cheese into the buttermilk to form a creamy texture. The texture is identical to traditional recipes, and, even better, this method allows the cheese to really shine.

My other tweak to traditional wedge salad recipes is to very lightly cook the tomatoes in bacon fat. It makes use of the hot skillet and rendered fat from crisping bacon, infuses the tomatoes with a hint of smoke, and, critically, softens the tomatoes enough to more easily integrate with the salad. Once you dig in, the tomatoes start to fall apart, mixing and mingling with the lettuce and bacon bits, further enhancing the harmony of the salad.