Living on the Wedge

In a turn of events certain to have put the majority of my vast readership off their dinners, I haven't been available to make pretentious comments about food since Thursday.  It's simply a case of work getting in the way of work; I have been too busy creating Wedge Salads to write a single thing.  (And too busy contemplating purchasing a new camera.  Please forgive me for the lamentable quality of my Wedge Snapshots compared to the one I stole off the internet.  Lovely, isn't it?  Yet so unlikely to be as delicious as my own poorly lit Wedges.) 

For those of you who find it difficult to discern the one commonality among the first four salads photographed here, a Wedge Salad is any salad where you use a large intact portion of a head of iceberg lettuce as the salad base.  Usually, one uses a quarter of an iceberg lettuce for a single serving, but as iceberg lettuce is 95-96% water, I sometimes use an entire half a head for one person's dinner.  Ultimately, as in any salad, the lettuce is simply the vehicle for the dressing.  But in my own Wedge, the lettuce is also the Sun, around which carefully-piled ingredients orbit like delectable planets.

Most recipes for Wedge Salads, like Paula's Deen's, call for blue cheese dressing, bacon, and tomato; the recommended presentation typically has the ingredients piled in a simple, yet elegant manner on top of the Wedge.  However, I have been experimenting with sophisticated salad breeding techniques, pretentiously and selflessly, of course, in order to bring to you the CobbWedge, an ingenious hybrid of two classic salads, the Wedge and the Cobb.

A Cobb Salad, made famous by a debate as to its origin on Curb Your Enthusiasm and by the fact that practically every restaurant in America serves one, is an arrangement of blue cheese, hard-boiled egg, bacon, tomato, and avocado- and often chicken, and sometimes olives.  I had my first and only perfectly-executed Cobb Salad on the patio of Rockefeller Center at the age of 15, in which the ingredients were arranged in fastidiously neat rows, or columns, depending on how I turned to plate to admire them.  I've tried to find a picture to represent it, but it falls short, as do most attempts to relive one's childhood.

To create a CobbWedge is profoundly complicated.  As you can see here, the results are highly variable, but let me assure you this is only in measurable domains outside deliciousness, which has practically no variance as long as you select high-quality ingredients.  To serve two people, you boil two eggs (I find that, although the Joy of Cooking recommends 12-15 minutes for a hard-boiled egg, mine turn out perfectly in ten; it's like how some kids skip a grade) and fry until very crisp two slices of bacon.  As you may be able to tell from my locally-produced photographs, you can use different types of bacon for different effects, or even substitute some sort of non-bacon sausage meat that only a male companion would purchase.  The bacon can be crumbled, cut into chunks, or even left whole, as in dark and mysterious home-cooked-photograph #3.  The egg should definitely be sliced into strips or diced (they may also be left out, as in sausage-marked salad #2, though this is not recommended for anyone but male companions performing independent research, and even then they better have been, er, be, in a terrible hurry).

In addition to one egg and one piece of bacon, each person should get half an avocado and a small handful of either cherry or, preferably, grape tomatoes, sliced in half so as to boost and separate their flavor prior to meeting the Wedge.  The avocado should be cut to match whatever design you applied to your hard-boiled eggs.  Then, carefully position all the ingredients casting the head of lettuce as Vincent Chase and the avocado, bacon, and tomato as Turtle, Drama, and E, thus creating tight-knit bundles of distinct ingredients worshiping the Wedge.  Finally, douse the Wedge in California sunshine, bikini-clad ladies, or blue cheese dressing, topping it off with real crumbled blue cheese if you are an insane partier or have recently won the female lead in an unexpected, yet welcome, upcoming third installment in the Bridget Jones' Diary series.

Apply pepper just before photographing in a shadowy apartment around cocktail hour.