Free Yo' Bacon Marrrrr-ma-laaaaaaaade!

On this, Day 23 of 30 Days of Blogging, we are going off topic, because I have to tell you what I'm eating.

I don't have a man, but let's pretend that someday I might, and someday he might sleep over, and we'll assume that he didn't kick me or steal the covers or leave the closet door open (because OH MY GOD, HOW CAN I SLEEP WITH CLOSET MONSTER STARING AT ME?)or do anything else to make me wish slow death upon him, and instead we will imagine that I wake up first and want to prepare a special breakfast that says, "I want you to live and I want to do something really nice for you."

This is the breakfast that I would prepare:



Pancakes with bacon marmalade.

Yes, bacon marmalade is a thing that exists, and I made it tonight from a recipe in a "Southern comfort food" magazine.

To start, I needed a cup of sorghum syrup. For those unfamiliar, sorghum is a grass kind of like sugar cane, and sorghum syrup is produced from it. I had a bottle in my refrigerator that I'd already used some of for homemade barbecue sauce, so I was a little short of the cup this recipe called for:



I filled in the rest of the cup with molasses, which is not a perfect solution, but it's not like I keep extra sorghum in the pantry. It's really, really sweet.

Next I had to dice half a cup of bacon. Dicing bacon is a pain, because it is slimy and slips around when you're trying to slice, so I just cut it up with kitchen scissors:



After that I had to cook the bacon in a skillet. I usually do mine in the oven, but the recipe said skillet, so I cooked away:







Then I had to drain the bacon, wipe out the skillet, return the bacon to the skillet, add the sorghum, and cook it down a little, stirring frequently:



After that I had to add cider vinegar, which smells good but which you should not lean over while cooking:



cook until it reduced by half, then add chicken broth:



and reduce it down again:



And there it was.

I let it cool, made pancakes while it was doing so, and oh my God was this totally worth spending over an hour on dinner for. It tastes sweet, cidery, and bacony all at the same time, and then you bite into pieces of candied bacon while chewing and that's kind of indescribable.

Other than "delicious", I mean.

Weekend Blurbs

It's still the time of year when I don't really go anywhere or do much besides work and sleep, so I don't have much to report for the weekend or many new photos. I do have a couple of small things, though.

1) Maple bacon donuts are delicious.

One of Kristin's staff members arrived to move in with two boxes of donuts from Julie Darling Donuts in Chattanooga, and when the desk staff opened the box to look inside, they discovered this:



A donut with maple frosting and bacon on top. (I think the official name on the menu is "Pancakes and Bacon".) I was of the opinion that I should eat it immediately and that everyone else should just back away from the donut box, because if ever a donut was created just for me it's that donut, but I'm not actually on Kristin's staff and the donuts were for them, so we took the box to her and then I begged for it.

Begged.

I have no shame.

Kristin broke off a little piece, because she was curious, and then I devoured the rest:



It was sweet and salty at the same time, and the donut itself was moist and slightly cakey, which is the way I like them, and I kind of want to drive to Chattanooga right now to pick up a dozen or so of them.

And then eat them in the car on the way home, cry, and turn around to get more.

2) On my way back from the office today I stopped at McKay's to turn in a small bag of books and look for a few new releases. While I was waiting for them to evaluate the books I'd brought in, I heard this in the aisles:

"Who's Ray Bradbury?"

"I think it's in fiction, but, like, the literature fiction, not the regular kind."

Wait, what?

I normally don't give other shoppers more than a passing glance, but I looked and saw two kids with a list in hand, probably buying cheap books for class. Do they not have high school English classes in Tennessee now? I thought Fahrenheit 451 was pretty much required reading at some point in your high school career, and if not that then maybe The Illustrated Man. I'm not saying you have to be familiar with his entire body of work, but is it really possible to get to college without having any idea of who Ray Bradbury is?

Maybe Tennessee should spend less time banning certain ideas from the schools and more time actually educating the students.

3) I invented the Braintini.



I found a silicone ice cube tray at Target yesterday that promised to make ice cubes shaped like brains. It was cheap, and I need fun in my life, so I bought it. Then today, when I was getting groceries, I decided to pick up some heinously green Hawaiian Punch to fill the tray with.



I recommend dropping the ice brain into the drink after, rather than pouring your drink over it, because otherwise your ice brain melts a little and the folds smooth out, just like Charlie's brain in Flowers for Algernon.



The kids in McKay's today probably haven't ever read that, either.

questions from the weekend

I saw things this week. Strange things. Things that left me with questions.

1) Why is there a head in the back of this car?



We went over some serious bumps while driving behind these people on the way to the game against UT Martin (a shutout, but a disgrace, since rumor has it that Martin was recruiting walk ons the week before the game just to have a full roster of players) and that head didn't move. There's either a lot of tape, or that thing is attached to the back dash of that car.

And if it is attached, why? I probably have no room to talk since I have a toy on the dashboard of my car, but a cosmetology school model head? That seems excessive, even to me. Unless it has a name, I guess.

2) Why would you waste an entire bag of gummi worms?



What kind of monster throws candy on the ground and lets it rot? Won't somebody think of the children, with their bright eyes and scrawny arms and mouths full of perfect white teeth? Don't they need a giant bag of chemically engineered fructose and vaguely fruitlike flavoring? This seems like a horrible waste, but it was also odd and kind of intriguing. Why aren't there any bugs eating it? Or animals? Aren't there hungry squirrels or ants or rats or something that aren't getting enough high fructose corn syrup?

And where did the bag go? Did they melt together in the bag in the hot sun, and then someone dumped them out? But if they did that, shouldn't the bag be there, too? Why would you throw one away and not the other?

3) How is this toy somehow less spooky in the picture than it was in real life?



I saw this finger puppet in one of the stores on Market Square, and I think I might have actually shuddered, if only for a second. There was a finger puppet of Satan in the same store that was somehow less disturbing than this puppet. Why would you buy this for a child? That thing is nightmare fuel, pure horror in rubberized form. It's totally appropriate for a child you don't like, I guess, but why not just give them socks or vegetables?

4) Shouldn't this be in a refrigerator?



Vacuum sealed raw meat creeps me out. I know it's supposedly perfectly safe and all that, but even in the vacuum bag there can be temperature fluctuations, long slow sleaks (entropy will eventually fill any vacuum), and it just looks gross. Anything that unruly children in Mast General can pick up and hit each other with and then put back when their lazy mother finally notices that her bratty kids are treating the store like a playground is not fit to be served at a meal.

But don't you want to slap someone in the face with a pack of raw bacon now, just to see what it's like?

Bacon as Candy

My friends, who know of my love of bacon, have been trying to get me on the "bacon candy" train for years now. I've been emailed a number of recipes, most recently by my friend Elizabeth, and after reading my friend Justin's hilarious account of his own try at this last week I decided that I might as well try it, too. After that, I'm going to jump off of a bridge because all of my friends are doing it.

Anyway, in reviewing a number of techniques and suggestions, I decided that I would keep my attempt simple:



Dark chocolate and bacon. Simple, classic culinary horror. Some people add alcohol, some people add pepper or chili powder, some recipes call for a sprinkling of chopped nuts, but I decided that it was better to let the bacon and the chocolate speak for itself. "Simple ingredients, prepared well" is the cornerstone philosophy of many cooking styles, although I get the distinct impression that this isn't the kind of recipe they had in mind.

While picking out the chocolate was easy, picking out the bacon was a bit of a challenge. This may come as a surprise to many of my friends, but I don't actually buy that much bacon, and only buy pork bacon when a recipe calls for it. Otherwise, I go with turkey bacon because it is low fat and stays flat when you microwave it. Anyway, in looking for bacon for this recipe I decided to avoid flavored bacon, like the maple cured, and to get a standard size rather than thick cut, because I think regular bacon gets crispier.

(Thick cut is recommended for the "glazed bacon" variation of bacon candy, where the bacon is baked on a sheet tray with a glaze that usually includes brown sugar and/or maple syrup. Greasy Lisa used a variation of this technique to win an elimination challenge and trip to Italy on season 4 of "Top Chef".)

Cooking the bacon was easy enough. Preheat the oven, cover a cookie sheet in parchment paper (some recipes said to do this and some didn't, but it seemed like it would make the cleanup easiest), and pop it in for 25 minutes:



It crisps right up, and stays mostly flat:



It comes out swimming in an ocean of bacon grease, though. If you try making bacon this way, be sure to use a rimmed cookie sheet. If possible, use a raised rack on a rimmed cookie sheet, so that the grease drips off. Since I didn't have a raised rack, I fished the bacon out with tongs and set it on a plate covered with folded paper towels to drain.

While the bacon was draining and cooling, I got to work on the chocolate, using the improvised double boiler that I figured out when I made that Christmas chocolate bark that no one liked a few years ago.







A few pointers before anyone tries this:

1) Make sure your bowl is wide enough not to fall into the pot. I refuse to explain how I know this is the kind of problem that needs to be pointed out.

2) Make sure your bowl is oven-safe, because it will get really hot. Fortunately, I have never exploded a dish in this fashion, but I know people who have.

3) Make sure that the bottom of the bowl is above the boiling water, not in it. If the chocolate gets too hot, it will start to crystallize. This is what happens to chocolate almost every single time I microwave it for melting.

With the bacon cooked and the chocolate melted, I was ready to go. Using a silicone basting brush (because it's nonstick), I started coating my bacon on one side:



Once it was painted, I chilled it in the freezer:



and turned it over to paint the other side:



Once that was done, I chilled it again, and then ate some.

And it turns out that I kind of don't like it.

I like chocolate with salty things in it. Chocolate covered pretzels, chocolate caramels with sea salt on top, stuff like that. And I liked the taste of the bacon with the chocolate, but the problem was that there was too much chocolate. Even though I painted it on thinly and evenly, the overall effect is kind of like a candy bar with a piece of bacon inside, and hardly seemed worth all the effort, especially when you can just order a candy bar with bacon in it from amazon.

While this was an interesting novelty, I don't think I'll be making it again.