Bacon - - Page 25

by rooms

Why Waste Perfectly Good Bacon Grease?

So I was at the ‘real’ grocery store the other day; I don’t go there very often because I do 75% of my food shopping at Tran’s Market. Anyway, whenever I do go I usually stop by the fish counter because I love seafood, but I like to eat it the day I buy it. So I picked up some Haddock, and then I noticed they also had these beautiful creatures called Mahogany Clams in the display.

They have a thick shell like a quahog and similar size, but much more beautiful. I asked the guy about them, and he said that he didn’t know what they were like, but probably good, not very good sellers because people didn’t know what they were. A ringing endorsement.

I live in Maine; apparently we don’t like to try new things here. I asked if they were local and he said he thought so, pretty much all their shellfish is local. And they were 15 cents a piece! Cents, my friends. There was even a little cents sign. Remember the good old “c” with a diagonal line through it? I was sold.

I picked up a dozen and a half.

My plan was to make clams casino, which I had never made, but knew contained bacon. I looked up a bunch of recipes and the common theme was mix some stuff with butter, cook your clams until they just open, put the butter mixture on top with a bit of already cooked bacon and broil until brown. Something about throwing out all that perfectly good bacon grease and then using a bunch of butter just didn’t make sense to me, so my version of bacon-y good mahogany clams casino after the jump.

by BS

100 Ways to Crack an Egg

According to legend (a.k.a. wikipedia), the folds in a chef’s hat used to represent the number of ways s/he knew how to cook an egg, with the vaunted 100-fold hat reserved for the heads of only the most knowledgeable culinary experts. But are there really 100 ways to prepare eggs? ES set out on an exploration across the food blogosphere to find out, and our answer is a decidedly delicious “yes.”

We’re reporting back and presenting our 100 favorite ways to cook an egg. If you’ve ever looked in the fridge and said, “I’ve got tons of eggs, but no idea what to cook with them,” well, you have no excuse to ever do that again. Just come right back here. Or better yet, print this out and hang it in your kitchen.

Presenting the comprehensive Endless Simmer guide to 100 ways to cook an egg:

in 100 Ways / Bacon / Breakfast / Eggs / Lists / Recipe / Sandwich 138 comments

by BS

Feed Us Back: Comments of the Week

Good Friday breakfast the way Jesus would have wanted it.

– THANKS to everyone who emailed about joining the ES blogging team. It may take us a minute but we’ll get back to all of you.

– As far as gefilte fish goes, JoeHoya is tired of the “_______ is the new bacon” meme: I don’t care how amazing (or, conversely, how daring/perverse) gefilte fish is…any comparison to bacon is just wrong. Bacon is clearly the new bacon.

– westcoast is A-OK with PETA’s sexy ads: Your argument lost me a little. I believe that PETA’s campaigns are always a little over the top (today’s news is that they have asked the Pet Shop Boys to change their name — or a few weeks ago the news that fish should be called “sea kittens” (as if we really treat kittens as a whole that well)). Perhaps PETA is just trying to say to those who think vegetarians are weird, pale, fragile beings that vegetarians can actually be hot and they aren’t all weird. Sometimes it takes campaigns like this to affect the closed-minded.

But Valerie thinks they’ve gone too far: The book “Skinny Bitch” pisses me off too. I read the excerpt that is available through Amazon’s “search inside” feature and right off the bat they ban coffee and beer. Two of my favorite things! Anyway, I’m in agreement on the bigger point here: there are a lot of good reasons to go vegetarian, but PETA has honed in on possibly the worst reason.

And Pinch o Minch gets right to the point: Heavens to betsy that has to be GORE-TEX sock.

– You ESers are full of bright ideas for perfecting that hummus recipe:

in Bacon / Holiday / Veggie 6 comments

by BS

Pig Progress: Very Necessary Eating Inventions Roundup

– “Cook better, look better, bite better” with the triple-spiral slicer Wunder Weener.

– Everyone give a big round of thanks to Sweden for FINALLY inventing a 100-percent real bacon product that comes in a tube. Behold Squeez Bacon.

– And at long last, a product that gets that bacon-y smell where you need it the most: Bacon Lube.

*I’ll let you readers decide which, if any, of these new products are April Fools jokes. Personally, I’m going to go ahead and believe in them all. The world is better that way.

More Bacon: Recipes, raves and other bacon bits in Endless Bacon.

in Bacon / Endless Bacon / Pig 2 comments

by tvff

When The Wife’s Away…

…I eat like a six year old. Yep, those are tater-tots.

Hey, I didn’t feel like cooking and I had a rather large burrito for lunch so I wasn’t in the mood for a multi-course meal. But I do have a point beyond inviting you to laugh at my culinary transgression.

The more interesting item in the back is a fried egg sandwich that contains a special ingredient — an impulse buy during my last trip to the grocery store. That slice of porky goodness is the pride of Trenton, New Jersey…Taylor’s Pork Roll.

in Bacon / Breakfast / Eggs / Pig / Sandwich 7 comments

by gansie

And On Wednesday She Cooked Two Dinners

Monday night I went to Belmont‘s book club meeting where she served an African-inspired hearty, pureed, spicy (canned) squash soup. It was the color of puke but was absolutely wonderful. Perfect for a cold, winter night. All of the bookies are waiting for her to post the semi-elaborate recipe. I do know, however, that she spiked the soup with red wine and whiskey. And right there I vowed to myself to abuse 80’s liquor cabinet on behalf of our meals, kinda like this truffle amazingness. A selfless host indeed, Belmont took the time to shake up a blood orange vinaigrette and a salad full of fresh spinach and blood orange segments and the bitch doesn’t even like fruit. She’s a real crowd pleaser. Plus the from-scratch vanilla pudding.

So that was Monday.

Tuesday I attended a press dinner at the very new Inox. It was all the way out in Tysons so I was <this close> to not trekking out there. But, good lord, I’m glad I sacrificed some oil for the tasting dinner:

endive salad with blood orange (two salads with blood orange in two days!) paired with the creamiest nugget of bleu cheese – and I hate that usually funky shit;
red snapper in a lively ginger-lemongrass curry bouillon which also had beautiful indigo colored-basil seeds floating around – had a great, and surprising, kick;
lobster, glorious lobster;
pink slices of pan seared duck downed with bites of artichoke, fennel, olives and sun dried tomato;
crispy, meaty skate wing and a pudgy scallop;
elderflower soup which scared the shit out of me because it looked exactly like a jellyfish (did anyone else get forced to watch seven pounds??);
a chocolate bread pudding with – GET THIS – kalamata olive oil sherbert infused in the creaminess. First you receive traditional chocolate, but then it’s salty, and tangy, and briny and holy shit it tastes like an olive, but there is no olive, just the essence of an olive. It’s a real trick on your brain. A beautiful trick that I would gladly fall for again;
fruity, light, juicy pineapple dessert, but I couldn’t keep my tongue away from the chocolate-oliveness;
ended with petits fours;
lots of wine throughout served by the cockiest, driest sommelier I’ve ever encountered. His demeanor was actually refreshing compared to the normal ass kissing wine expert. He was still kinda a dick though. But only in the nicest possible way.

So that was Tuesday. And sorry, Amy, for taking the LONG way home.

Anyway, I was tired from two nights out, plus I’d been living with a cold for the past few days, and I was excited to get back into the kitchen. It’s funny how much I missed it there. And this is how I know I’m really crazy. You know how everyone is like, oh, I only want to make one meal, one meal in one pot, something easy on a week night. Well, I like cooking so much that I enjoy making 80 and I different dinners. They’re usually similar in scope, but contain different ingredients.

Here goes crazy.

in Bacon / Cheese / Endless Bacon / Fowl / Pig / Recipe / Veggie 6 comments