For a short time Ian and I worried that our baby was switched at the hospital. Elsa wouldn't eat bacon. But then she came around. She loves it as much as we do. Yay! The family who eats bacon together, stays together. Unless, of course, you're a vegan or vegetarian family. But that's not the focus of this blog, or my problem, really.
There is a new cookbook called I Love Bacon! and I have a copy of it. The photos of bacon are to die for, naturally. The photographer is the awesome Ben Fink whose work I admired in Cider Beans, Wild Greens, and Dandelion Jelly.
It seems a little bit wrong for a book called I Love Bacon! to be written/published by an author who lives north of the Mason-Dixon line. But, oh well. What can you do? Surely they love bacon up there as much as we do in the middle and lower halves of the country.
It's a smallish book with a glossy cover that features a pile of bacon. Its recipes, much like the aforementioned Cider Beans, were gathered by Jayne Rockmill from folks she contacted such as Christopher Rendell, Chris Cosentino, Ellen Burke Van Slyke, Monica Byrne, etc.
As expected, the dishes feature bacon as an ingredient or topping. Yet there is no full-on (full frontal!?) bacon dish. Bacon is paired with other things and never eaten alone. So the savory bacon bread pudding looked like a winner to me. As did the bacon-wrapped mango chutney and manchego-stuffed dates.
Now wait. Maybe that isn't just right. Bacon is the focus in first few recipes in I Love Bacon! There's classic cured bacon which takes you through the steps of rolling the pork belly in brown sugar, kosher salt, pink salt, and pepper. Then you seal this in a container, pop it in the fridge and take it out in a week. Next, there's spicy braised bacon and soy-ginger braised bacon and those require one pound or two pounds (slabs!!) of bacon. Next comes the pork belly. There's crispy pork belly and Chinese-style pork belly. Just hope you can choose between the two.
Bacony desserts (and drinks as well) like chocolate-dipped smoked almond-bacon brittle reinterpret the favorite peanut brittle. Chocolate bacon cupcakes? Meh. Maybe? I looked for a surprise in this one, like, perhaps bacon in the batter, but that was not to be. The bacon is used to sprinkle atop the icing. And the icing was made with bacon fat. Imagine that. For the maple bacon ice cream, you stir in three ounces of minced bacon as you're making the ice cream in your maker or churn.
Nevertheless, all the recipes looked fabulous. There's not one that I wouldn't try. Okay, probably won't do the oysters or any of the seafood dishes because Tennessee is not a coastal state. Fingers crossed, though. What with global warming and rising ocean waters, we can hope that we have an ocean an hour's drive away someday.
Probably not in my lifetime, either. But life is filled with a load of probability.
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