Chi-Town Bacon Opportunities

This article intrigues me.

The country fried bacon at the Risque Cafe sounds amazing, but the all-you-can-eat Monday night bacon at Chinaski's, well. Well! I love bacon AND Bukowski! Count me in!

Canned/Precooked Bacon face-off

Ligaya* alerts me to another installment in the Onion AV Club's journey to bacon bliss. This one is a taste test of canned bacon and precooked bacon. Big surprise - can bacon seems to be exactly as disgusting as you'd expect. And the precooked bacon just makes me sad. You save a few minutes, sure. And you take a major hit in taste and mountains of added chemical nonsense. 

*Ligaya didn't request a specific link, but she works with this organization and I wanted to give it a shout-out. I met a lot of the people working there when I was in China last winter, and they're absolute rock stars. Plus, the organization is grass-roots local empowerment at its best, supporting people rather than rolling in with piles of money and running their world for them. It's an amazing organization.

Bacon mayo in the NYTimes

And my dear friend Katie sent me a link to this article in the NYTimes about their competition for the best use of bacon mayo (original recipe for bacon mayo can be found here). I'm not into mayonnaise myself, but I endorse the general sentiment.

Meanwhile, dear readers, the weather in Chicago is turning crispy and autumnal, which means it's time to start working on my winter coat, ie, eat more bacon. So more updates soon.

In the meantime, thanks for the contributions!

Porkopolis

Dan from Porkopolis sends the following email:

Hi culture_vulture,

In this age, the lack of proper support and funding for bacon research is shameful. Your efforts at rooting on through the wastelands of healthful, low fat and meatless menus is commendable. Bravo!! I'd like to suggest a few bacon related items I thought you might like to include at Theories of Bacon:

1)
I just added a new poem to my collection in the Porkopolis Library.
"Bacon" by the cowboy poet Badger Clark:
http://www.porkopolis.org/lib/poetry/clark-b.php
AND
there is also "Song of Bacon" by Roy Blount, Jr.:
http://www.porkopolis.org/lib/poetry/blount-r.php#blount2

2)
Salvador Dali's "Soft Self-portrait with Grilled Bacon" is in the Porkopolis.org Art Museum:
http://www.porkopolis.org/art_gal/dali.php#dali4

3)
And finally, I found this advertising image of Bacon Love at The Museum of Mid-Century Illustration.
What a fun image. Maybe you can develop a blog entry around it? We'll always have bacon...
http://www.plan59.com/av/av192.htm

All of the Porkopolis.org site is available for you to use for bacon research.
I'd appreciate a credit link if any ideas are spawned.

Root on,
Dan

Thanks so much Dan! Keep up the good work!

Its so true

Thanks to the folks at Married to the Sea for the wisdom. And the great comics.

Spaghetti Carbonara

It's not a very appealing picture, and the idea of semi-cooked eggs might make you a bit squeamish, but really, it's so simple to make, and quite tasty.

Spaghetti Carbonara

2-3 strips bacon

1-2 eggs

pasta

parmesan

salt

pepper

Boil water for pasta. Add salt. Coarsely chop the bacon. When the water is boiling, add pasta. Then put the bacon in a frying pan over medium-low heat. As those are in process, grate a handful or two of good parmesan into a bowl. Crack an egg or two into the bowl, and beat with a fork. Add a hefty amount of freshly ground pepper. When the pasta is cooked, drain it and dump in the bowl, tossing it like mad to coat it evenly with egg. The bacon should be nice and crispy at this point, so fold it in as well - though you probably wanna use a slotted spoon or some such device to remove it from the pan, because otherwise your pasta will be ridiculously greasy. 

Ideally, the final result is a somewhat gooey and creamy pasta, with the egg partly cooked and the parmesan partly melted, accentuated by the ground pepper and crispy bacon. 

All in all, it takes less than 10 minutes to make, and is pretty basic. A lot of carbonara recipes involve cream, but I find that it becomes much too heavy that way - the cheese, egg and bacon is already pretty rich. All the same, it's a fairly simple dish, and I'm still trying to think of ways to spice it up a bit. Please to leave comments with any ideas. 

Haggerty

I got the recipe for this from Maura Laverty's marvelous cookbook, Feasting Galore Irish Style, which has more bacon recipes than you can shake a stick at, not to mention a lovely style riddled with anecdotes. It comes across very much as a cookbook full of recipes that someone mostly wrote down from memory, perhaps in a bit of a hurry, while also reminiscing lovingly about various occasions in which these dishes were cooked. This sometimes requires you to improvise - in this case, for instance, the recipe never actually said what to do with the cheddar cheese - but it's wonderful nonetheless. What follows is my version of the dish:

Haggerty

3 medium sized potatoes

1 onion

a couple slices of bacon

some bacon grease

some cheddar

Slice the potatoes and onion paper thin. Chop up the bacon and fry it in a medium sized pan. Once it's done, remove the bacon, set it aside, and leave the grease. Throw another spoon or so of bacon grease into the pan. Then, put in a layer of potatoes, followed by a layer of onion. Sprinkle some cheddar on. Repeat. When you get to the middle, put the bacon in with the cheddar. Also, work it such that the top layer is potato. Oh! and sprinkle some salt and pepper in there*. Drop a few spots of bacon grease onto the top potato layer. Cook until the bottom has gotten nice and crispy, then carefully slide it only a plate, then return it to the pan bottom side up. Or flip it in the pan, if you have that much faith in yourself. As you can discern from the photo, I managed to botch this part a bit. Cover and cook until it's done - if you've sliced the potatoes thin enough, the whole thing shouldn't take more than 20 minutes or so. Slice into wedges and serve.

*I forgot the salt and pepper and just added it at the end. It came out ok, but I think it would have been better if I'd integrated it into the cooking process.