Underground Charcuterie

An interesting article in the Reader about the secret world of pork.

I have mixed feelings on the issue myself - on the one hand, I love food and am naturally inclined to be in favor of those who want to make delicious things for me. On the other hand, yeah, food sanitation laws exist for a reason. A very good reason. Personally, I am somewhat fearless when it comes to meat, and regularly make steak tartarre with ground beef from Whole Foods, but yeah, e. coli and salmonella are for realz yo.

Another pasta idea

The inspiration for this came from a recipe in Claudia Roden's Middle Eastern Cooking - one of my all-time favorite cookbooks. It doesn't involve bacon, surprise surprise, it involves stewing beef for over an hour. I didn't feel like doing that tonight, but I saw a recipe on Epicurious for a bacon-tomato-onion pasta that looked sort of mediocre, and I thought hmmm, what if I combine the two, and season the boring pasta recipe with Roden's suggested spices? Voila! Delicious dinner.

Yeah - not the most appealing picture. I dunno why it looks so... pink.

To create, you need

4 slices bacon

1 onion

1 tomato

cumin, salt, allspice, cayenne, cinnamon, ginger, chili powder

pasta

Chop up the bacon and fry it up on medium heat. Meanwhile, set the water to boil, with salt and get to work chopping the onions. At some point in this process your water will boil, and when it does, add the pasta.

Once the bacon is mostly done, reduce the heat to low, push the bacon to one side and add the onions. Saute a few minutes until soft, using the time to chop up the tomato. Add the tomato, and then the spices - basically, as much cayenne as you want, depending on how much spice you can handle, a large pinch of everything else. Continue cooking over low heat, basically until your pasta is done - as the tomatoes cook, they sort of collapse, and the whole thing becomes a bit more saucy.

It's a really lovely dinner. I know the spices sound totally bizarre, but together, they're really quite amazing, and are wonderfully complemented by the bacon, as are the softer textures of the tomato and onion. It's an incredibly simple meal, but really quite tasty.

Twitter Bacon Thing

Lauren, who works for a major fast food chain, has asked me to post something about a Bacon competition that's happening on Twitter between November 9th and 20th. So, I guess for a few more days? Huh.

Anyhow, it can be found at @UrBaconMeCrazy (ooooh, I get it now. I was all, who're you calling Bacon, Crazy?) on Twitter. I assume that gives you enough information to find it? I personally kind of despise Twitter. But this apparently allows you to win some money, so I figured hey, you might wanna know about it.

Bacon Nail Art

Tiana sent me a link to some seriously incredible bacon nail art.

Seriously awesome. It's from a blog that contains a new nail design every day. It is my new favorite blog.

More complaints about bacon

From SF Weekly, another enough already with the bacon! article.

This one, however, has a pretty weak argument, in that it lists 5 things that are meant to serve as evidence that the bacon craze has gone too far, and all of them sound kind of delicious.

Incidentally, they also have a piece on Top 5 Caffeinated Things that Shouldn't Be that's kind of interesting. I don't eat sunflower seeds myself, but I do love coffee cookies, bloody marys and coffee during Sunday brunch (and Sparks! don't even get me started on how much I love Sparks! and how sad I am that it's banned in multiple states and generally seems to be going the way of the dodo). I keep a thingy (tube? stick?) of Spazzstick in my coat pocket (it tastes delicious) and back in college I bought Water Joe by the CASE. So fie on you SF Weekly, y'all are a bunch of haters who don't know what's good in this world.

Caffeinated soap and/or body wash, however, seems kind of ridiculous to me.