Well, another baconfest has come and gone.

I can’t believe we’ve been doing this for 5 years already. It seems like just the other day we started doing this. Can I just say that I’m *so* not tired of this yet? Best. Tradition. Ever.

Like all good traditions, some parts have fallen by the wayside (e.g. The Watching of the Kevin Bacon Movie), and other traditions have sprung up (e.g. The Waking of Guests With the Talking Bacon — seriously, this is the part the kids look forward to the most!)

It is, however, a mega-ton of work. From planning the menu, to running around buying the bacon for the taste test, to cooking everything for days beforehand, to the smell of bacon leaking into every nook and cranny of your house, your clothes, your very nostrils…yeah, I was a little stressed out.

This year was particularly bad. Not only did the kids have their big ballet performance during baconfest on Saturday, but we also went to see Welcome to Nightvale on Friday night (post to come; I’m a little behind!). Add in the ballet dress rehearsal / costume fitting on Thursday, swim class, etc. and it was just a little much for the week.

Because of all that, the menu was a little light this year. Most of the meals had to be quick ones, so we didn’t overdo it on the bacon this year. I think this might have been the first year that I didn’t feel like I ate a whole pig by the end of the day, so I guess it wasn’t all bad.

On the flipside, my heart hardly had to struggle to pump blood through my bacon-clogged arteries, which means it didn’t get any exercise this year and is probably going to grow weak.

For breakfast this year, we basically just had scones. They didn’t even have bacon in them! But we had the taste test as part of breakfast, so that was bacon enough.

For lunch, we had a Bacon Chopped Salad with Bacon Vinaigrette (see above), and it was just about perfect. Really hit the spot. We also had a Spaghetti Squash with Bacon, Spinach and Goat Cheese (see below), and followed that up with Oatmeal Cookies with Molasses & Bacon Fat. The cookies were actually really, really amazing, though not particularly bacon tasting (which actually was okay with me).

Finally, for dinner we needed something simple, since we were coming from ballet, so we just had two dips, with veggies and crackers. The first, the Bacon Cheddar Ale Cheese Spread, pretty much stole the show for the weekend, but the Bacon, Scallion and Caramelized Onion Dip wasn’t bad either. And then more cookies, natch.

Finally, we ended on a game of Agricola, the most bacony of games, which — what’s that? Oh, I won? Oh, oh, I see. I believe that’s 3 in a row for me, which is an unprecedented win streak for anyone not named Sara. I’m like the Sara of Agricola.

Stay tuned for more baconfest posts this week. Here on the Halbach channel, it’s all bacon, all the time.