Colorful and Satisfying 5-Ingredient Skillet Meal with Bacon

This simple dish is not humble! It bursts colors, flavors, and textures. Succulent and satisfying, it’s easy to make even when busy. Whip up this fabulous 5-ingredient keto skillet meal in a cinch and make your family and their tummies happy!

How to make this Colorful and Satisfying 5-Ingredient Skillet Meal with Bacon

Even though this dish needs a bit of chopping some ingredients, it’s easy to make. First, you’ll fry some bacon, then add more ingredients in a certain order, cook, and you are done.

When cherry tomatoes are fried in bacon fat, they turn into really tasty and succulently soft. On the other hand, this dish also contains zucchini, and zucchini I recommend keeping al dente, i.e., crisp-tender. Soft and mushy zucchini is just sad.

Feta and bacon make this dish really tasty and satisfying. If feta is not your favorite, check the tips for variations at the end of this post. For even more flavor, this dish includes some olives as well.

That’s it, there you’ve got all the 5 ingredients: bacon, cherry tomatoes, zucchini, feta, and olives. Sounds tasty, doesn’t it?

So, let’s take a look at how to make this easy and satisfying keto skillet meal:

Take one medium zucchini. Remember to wash it and pat it dry! My zucchini here weighs about 12 oz (340 g).

Cut the zucchini into largeish cubes (about 1 inch = 2.5 cm in size). Set aside.

Next, take 2 cups (470 ml) cleaned cherry tomatoes.

Halve them and set aside.

Now, you’ll need 7 oz (200 g) feta cheese.

Cut the feta into about 1/2-inch (1.3 cm) cubes. Set them also aside for a while.

Then, you’ll need about 16 slices of bacon.

Chop the bacon.

Take a skillet and heat it over medium-high heat. Fry the bacon in the skillet…

…until crispy.

Remove the bacon from the skillet but leave the bacon fat in the skillet.

Add the halved cherry tomatoes and cook them in the bacon fat for about 10 minutes…

…until soft.

Add the zucchini.

Cook for about 5 minutes, or until the zucchini starts to get a bit soft from the outside. Don’t cook it too soft but keep it crisp!

Add the feta cubes.

Add also 1/2 cup (120 ml) pitted Kalamata olives.

Finally, add the fried bacon.

Heat, stirring, until all ingredients are hot. Don’t cook them, though.

Serve immediately with chopped fresh herbs on top. I prefer parsley, but oregano, thyme, basil, and rosemary are fantastic options.

Yum!

How I came up with this easy keto meal recipe

As I was traveling for quite many weeks this summer, I wanted to prepare recipes and take photos for my upcoming blog posts beforehand. Like that, I would have the photos ready, so I don’t need to carry my camera and other photography equipment while traveling, I concluded. I just needed to write the blog post texts and edit the photos for my weekly posts.

I got the idea for this dish when traveling in Eastern Finland and accommodating in a place called Järvisydän. In the room, there was a small kitchenette that I used to cook my meals.

Before leaving Järvisydän, I had some leftover eggs, cherry tomatoes, and bacon that needed to be used up. I simply fried them in batches: first, I fried the bacon, then I fried halved cherry tomatoes in the bacon fat, and finally, I made scrambled eggs that I fried in the bacon fat — and the juices that were released from the tomatoes.

I served the bacon, tomatoes, and scrambled eggs separately. They made a super delicious combo! The crispy bacon was a fabulous accompaniment with creamy scrambled eggs and soft and juicy tomatoes.

At home, I remembered those soft and juicy fried cherry tomatoes and wanted to make a complete meal with them. A complete meal in one skillet, so to say.

However, I didn’t think of adding bacon at that point. Tomatoes were supposed to be the main ingredient, but I also planned to add feta for satisfaction and more flavor, and olives for more nutrients and even some additional flavor.

Since using only tomatoes would have made the meal a bit higher in carbs, I decided to add also zucchini as some kind of low-carb bulk ingredient. It would also lend a nice color and some texture when cooked until crispy, I thought.

And since I wasn’t thinking of using bacon, I was planning to cook the cherry tomatoes in olive oil until soft. However, I soon remembered the meal in Järvisydän and how delicious the tomatoes turned out when fried in bacon fat. At that moment, I decided to skip the olive oil and use bacon — and bacon fat — for the dish.

So, I now had my 5 ingredients: bacon, cherry tomatoes, zucchini, feta, and olives. After pondering the measures and the method of making the meal, I came up with a plan that sounded foolproof. It indeed was, and the result you’ll see here: a colorful, flavorful, and satisfying meal in one skillet!

Here’s the recipe for you to enjoy:

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Colorful and Satisfying 5-Ingredient Skillet Meal with Bacon

Yield: 4

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Cook Time: 20 minutes

Total Time: 35 minutes

This simple dish is not humble! It bursts colors, flavors, and textures. Succulent and satisfying, it's easy to make even when busy. Whip up this fabulous 5-ingredient keto skillet meal in a cinch and make your family and their tummies happy!

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Ingredients

• 1 medium zucchini
• 2 cups = 470 ml cherry tomatoes
• 7 oz = 200 g feta cheese
• 16 slices bacon
• 1/2 cup = 120 ml pitted Kalamata olives

Instructions

1. Cut the zucchini into about 1-inch (2.5 cm) cubes. Set aside.
2. Halve the cherry tomatoes. Set aside.
3. Cut the feta into about 1/2-inch (1.3 cm) cubes. Set aside for a while.
4. Chop the bacon.
5. Heat a skillet over medium-high heat. Fry the bacon in the skillet until crispy.
6. Remove the bacon from the skillet but leave the bacon fat in the skillet. Set the bacon aside.
7. Add the halved cherry tomatoes and cook them in the bacon fat for about 10 minutes, or until soft.
8. Add the zucchini and cook for about 5 minutes, or until the zucchini starts to get slightly soft from the outside. Don't cook it too soft but keep it crisp!
9. Add the feta cubes, olives, and the bacon.
10. Heat, stirring, until all ingredients are hot. Don’t cook them, though.
11. Serve immediately with chopped fresh herbs on top.
    

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Tips for variations

The easiest way to vary this dish is to add different herbs or seasonings. As I mentioned before, parsley, oregano, thyme, basil, and rosemary go well with this dish. Also, marjoram is worth trying.

If you need more piquant flavor for this meal, add a dash of sriracha sauce, Louisiana Hot Sauce, red pepper flakes, or cayenne pepper. Good old black pepper or white pepper work wonders, too.

For a natural flavor enhancer, add 1 teaspoon of onion powder while cooking the tomatoes. Another option is to add 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder.

Talking about garlic, you can add a couple of sliced or crushed garlic cloves together with the tomatoes and cook them until soft. Chopped onion is also great, even though I prefer onion powder as it’s so ridiculously easy to use compared to chopping onion or even using frozen chopped onion.

To make this dish even more satisfying, add a couple of eggs with the feta, olives, and the bacon and cook until scrambled but still creamy. Another option is to add fried and crumbled ground beef. Perfect seafood options are shrimp or tuna.

Don’t like feta? Then use cubed halloumi! Its salty and tasty flavor is like made with tomato, zucchini, and bacon. You can naturally use other types of cubed cheese, too, like Cheddar, Swiss cheese, cottage cheese, or plain mozzarella. The cheese will turn oozy and gooey — totally irresistible!

Sprinkling some freshly grated Parmesan on top of the dish before serving lends more flavor, too.

If you don’t like olives, you can simply omit them. If capers are what you like more, feel free to add 2 tablespoons of capers.

General prattling

This week was partially busy and partially relaxing. I spent the first two days of the week in a huge cottage we rented with Ketokamu after the Natural High Healing Festival. When the others were relaxing or having meetings, I cooked and baked. (I love multitasking, and sitting in a meeting is a horror for me, so I usually bake or cook while attending a meeting!)

Luckily, the others loved my bakings: hotdog buns, berry pie from bilberries and crowberries (the filling was according to this recipe, I just replaced the berries), various fat bombs, donuts, and ice cream bombs.

On Tuesday, I returned home as my son’s school started on Wednesday, and I wanted to prepare his school lunches in the freezer in advance.

The weather has been terrific, close to 80 °F (30 °C). That’s quite something here in the north! I’ve enjoyed the warmth to the maximum, sitting outside in the swing in my pergola and writing texts with my laptop.

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