Breakfast Greatness

A long time ago I posted about being a fan of grits and bacon.  It's still one of my go-to breakfasts, great for mornings when you have a little extra time, ie, can do something more exciting than cereal or a banana, or cereal with a banana, but not so much time that you can make pancakes. If, however, you have a spare half hour and want to really treat yourself, then, my friends, there's a version 2.0 that you have GOT to try. You start with your grits and bacon, but then, rather than eating it, you involve senor huevo, and oh man, it is awesome. Basically, you take the grits and bacon, pour em' into a baking dish, then make some dents in it, crack an egg into each dent, and bake. 

To be specific. For a (admittedly rather large) portion for 1, I used:

2 cups water

1/2 cup grits

a few pinches of salt

3 strips bacon

2 eggs

salt, pepper

To prepare:

Preheat oven to 350.

Put two cups water in small pot on high heat. Chop the bacon and fry it on low heat. When the water starts boiling, add salt and grits. Stir, turn heat to medium low, and simmer until the grits are done to your liking (generally around 5 minutes?). Your bacon oughta be done by then too. Dump both - together with all the bacon grease! - into a baking dish and stir thoroughly. Then use a spoon to make a sort of divot in the grits and gently crack an egg into it. Sprinkle salt and pepper on top. Slide it into the oven and bake approx 15 minutes. One could also, perhaps, go really wild and throw some cheese on there too. Oh behave!

Douse with hot sauce and enjoy. 

Pacific Foods White Bean and Bacon Soup from a Can

I had a bit of oral surgery last weekend (kids - don't bite your nails and chew on pencils. Or rip packages open with your teeth. Because apparently all that "trauma" can wear your teeth away under your gums, where you'll never suspect until one day, boom, nothing left, and then you need a bone graft, and that involves cutting your gums open and stitching them back on, and it's not much fun), so I was eating lots and lots of soup. Rather stupidly, I planned ahead by buying canned soup instead of making a batch of my own and freezing it. I say stupidly, because in the process, I learned that canned soup is pretty gross. All those preservatives leave a distinct trace in the flavor, and the consistency tends to be rather glue-like. But of all the soups I ate, one stood out as distinctly better than the rest - Pacific Foods brand organic Savory White Bean with Smoked Bacon.

I'm still not sure how I feel about the color scheme on the can.

(If you're wondering, some of the others were Amy's Thai Coconut Soup, which I expected to be a somewhat bland Tom Kha Kai, and essentially was, but that was a lot worse than I expected, Wolfgang Puck's Organic Old Fashioned Potato - especially glue like, and unpleasantly slimy, and Campbell's Hearty Beef Barley - their beef broth tastes like murder. That's the only way I can describe it. And I love meat.)

I knew fairly quickly that this soup was different, because when I was heating it up, it actually smelled good. Mostly like bacon, but with some good hearty vegetable notes as well. Also, the consistency was less slimy than the other soups I'd tried, which gave me hope.

Apologies for the horrible lighting, but I was on a lot of painkillers, so cut me a break.

As for the taste - well, it does have a hint of artificial, preservative-y flavor. Not nearly as aggressive as the other canned soups on the market, but it's definitely there. However, the vegetables actually look like a person chopped them instead of a machine. Probably it was just a more clever machine, but still, it's gratifying to eat vegetables that actually look and taste like vegetables. The beans and carrots were firm, not overcooked, and much more flavorful than expected. I was disappointed, however, by the lack of actual pieces of bacon in the soup. This also made me somewhat suspicious, because despite the conspicuous absence of our beloved food, there was a distinct flavor of smoky pork in the broth. It was nice - not overwhelming, and a nice compliment to the beans. 

While it wasn't bad, especially as far as canned foods go, more than anything else, it made me want to try my hand at making my own. 

Bacon Thermal Lance

This is so awesome.

"To make an airtight, less-flammable outer casing, I wrapped this fuel core with uncooked prosciutto before attaching one end of it to an oxygen hose. You can't imagine the feeling of triumph when I first saw the telltale signs of burning iron: sparks bursting from the metal, and then a rush of flame out of the other side as I witnessed perhaps the first-ever example of bacon-cut steel. And the lance kept on burning for about a minute."

iPhone Bacon

There is now a bacon application for iPhones.

Not only does it allow you to experience virtual bacon sizzling on your phone (if only it could somehow produce the smell!) but it will also, apparently, tell you about nearby restaurants that serve bacon, and also features an RSS feed that will tell you the latest bacon-related internet news (I wonder if this site is included. I kind of doubt it, alas.). All that bacon, straight to your iPhone or iPod touch for only $1.99! 

EDIT:

I stand corrected. I just received an email, subject line "Oh yes, we do read your site".

Do not f*ck with these people. THEY SEE ALL.

EDIT:

Also, they are very nice, friendly people who treated me to a free copy of the program. Review coming soon - I'm still test-driving it.

Crazy for Flavour, Bacon Salt in Europe

I received a lovely email this morning from Stu, a bacon enthusiast who is working to bring bacon salt to Europe and the UK. So for those of you living in those oh-so-very deprived nations, craving some pork-free bacon flavor, here you go! Stu is also interested in bringing bacon salt to the Middle East, thinking that people there will appreciate a way to get around the ban on pork. I'm not sure I agree with him on that one. I definitely disagree with his opinion that Middle Eastern food tastes like **** to Westerners, because it happens to be one of my favorite cuisines. And I kind of wish he wouldn't promote and disseminate such harmful stereotypes, because Westerners are already awfully close-minded when it comes to trying foreign foods, and this makes it all the more difficult to find food that hasn't been dulled down to suit a Western palate. But anyways.

Also, check out the blog, Crazy 4 Flavour, which features a lot of bacon salt recipes. Personally, I think I'll be using actual bacon when I give them a try, but whatever floats your boat. The recipes are definitely incredibly delicious looking.

Toad in the Hole

Ok, ok, so this isn't, strictly speaking, a bacon dish, but it did involve bacon in its creation, and it was seriously fantastic, so I figure why not. 

It may seem like a basic concept, poke a hole in a piece of bread and fry an egg in it, but there is ARTISTRY involved. If you don't believe me, check out my first attempt:

This is more like if somebody had tried to extract the toad from its hole using dynamite.

So, the basics are obvious perhaps, but I'm going to give you the step-by-step process that produces a truly beautiful toad in a hole. At least, by my standards.

Step 1: Fry a couple slices of bacon in a pan until crispy. Set aside, leaving (of course!) the glorious fat in the pan.

Step 2: Make a hole in a slice of bread. You want it to be about 2 inches in diameter, I'd say - big enough for the toad to fit in. Otherwise, your yolk'll break and doomy doom will ensue (see exhibit A).

Step 3: Place bread in pan. Brown one side, allowing it to absorb some greasy goodness, then flip it.

Step 4: Crack egg into hole - carefully. Some of the white will spill over the top. It's ok. In fact, you can sort of spread the white over the bread a bit so as to help it cook faster. 

Step 5: When the white that spilled over is fully cooked, and the egg generally appears mostly cooked, aside from the filmy layer on the top, grab a spatula, and, using a steady hand, remove the piece of bread from the pan. Then, holding it, carefully put it back in the pan, face down. You get it? Basically, you're flipping it. However, given the toad's fragile nature, it's actually more effective to remove it and flip the pan. 

Step 5: Cook for maybe 30 seconds more - if that. What you're going for here is cooked whites, runny yolk. So you want it in there just long enough to cook that filmy top layer, but not longer. 

Remove from pan. Arrange bacon on the sides in quasi-artistic fashion. I recommend sprinkling it with hot sauce at this point, but if you're gonna photograph it, do that first. It should look like this:

That's a fine looking toad.

And the inside of the yolk should look like this:

Intro bio assignments never looked this tasty.

A good strategy to approach the creature is to begin by dunking the bacon in the yolk, then picking the shortest side and attacking, later using the remnants of bread to mop off the plate.

Yum.

This is Why You're Fat

It's not explicitly about bacon, but I suppose it's not surprising to see plenty of bacon inspired entries: This is Why You're Fat is a blog that features creative unhealthy foods. These generally take the form of either deep frying some stuff, or of combining a bunch of unhealthy things into a kind of unholy calorie behemoth. Most of it isn't all that appealing, but some of it does look kind of delicious. Bacon wrapped mozarella? Hamburger crust pizza? Deep fried black pudding? Yummo. But I gotta say, it annoys the hell out of me when people just throw together the most high calorie things they can and deep fry them just for the hell of it. Respect your food man, shit. Don't just throw the bacon on for some token calories. Love the bacon. Savour its fantastic flavors. Just because a lot of delicious things contain a lot of calories, it doesn't mean that a lot of calories are always delicious.