My So Called Life

Baconfest 2014, Taste Test

/ Shane / Leave a comment

And the nominees are:

taste test 1 and 2taste test 3 and 4

For the 3rd year in a row, there was a “trick” bacon in the mix. This year it was venison bacon. It’s a blind taste test, but from appearance alone, you could tell something was not quite right…

deer bacon

..and not everybody was fooled.

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I’m always glad when the “trick” bacon scores low. Honestly, it wasn’t bad. We all agreed that it would be good on a sandwich. As a true competitor in the bacon taste test? Just, no.

Additionally, the texture of the Berkshire pork bacon really creeped people out, garnering comments of “texture was off”, “What animal is this?”, and “i DONT NO WAT IS WRONG WITH IT”.

Anyway, on to the results!

Nathan:

Brand Rating (1-10) Comments
Black Earth Meats Berkshire House Cured  7  Great flavor – lots of crunch but oddly soft too, texture was off
Jordanal Farms Hickory Smoked, Cured  9  Giant pieces – looked like a lot of fat but didn’t taste fatty; thicker cut; what I would classify as eggs and bacon bacon. Clearly whole meat cut.
Pernat’s Premium Meats (Venison Bacon)  2  Very lean and does not have the CRUNCH; clearly not whole cut meat; tastes like jerky
D&G  Sausage Shoppe – D&G Homestyle Bacon  8  Solid. Good, every day bacon (grocery store type) – nothing bad / nothing good, but the flavor couldn’t put it in the next level

Amanda:

Brand Rating (1-10) Comments
 Black Earth Meats Berkshire House Cured  6  Looked the worst. Smokey, salty. Didn’t like the first bite, but 2 & 3rd bites were better
 Jordanal Farms Hickory Smoked, Cured  5  Looked the best. Not much flavor. A little thick & leathery. Boring.
 Pernat’s Premium Meats (Venison Bacon)  -1 (0)  EEw. I know what this is. Deer != bacon.
 D&G  Sausage Shoppe – D&G Homestyle Bacon  9  NOM NOM NOM NOM! Perfectly balanced, not overly salty. Slightly smokey. perfect thickness. Looked good too. This is my jam.
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Sara:

Brand Rating (1-10) Comments
 Black Earth Meats Berkshire House Cured  4  Airy, greasy, tasteless. What animal is this?
 Jordanal Farms Hickory Smoked, Cured  7  Hammy flavor, nice, wide appearance, a little chewy.
 Pernat’s Premium Meats (Venison Bacon)  8  Looks like jerky, tastes like sausage, maybe I like this.
 D&G  Sausage Shoppe – D&G Homestyle Bacon  8  Very traditional and crispy. Might be Hormel, but I still like it. (salty)

Shane:

Brand Rating (1-10) Comments
 Black Earth Meats Berkshire House Cured  7  Nice texture, crisp, crumbly, nice fat. Appearance was a little off. Looked thin and off-colored.
 Jordanal Farms Hickory Smoked, Cured  8  Best appearance, wide flat pieces, chewier, more flavor. More what I expect bacon to taste like.
 Pernat’s Premium Meats (Venison Bacon)  4  Strange looking, more like thin ham. Too uniform, would be good on a sandwich, but not to eat for breakfast.
 D&G  Sausage Shoppe – D&G Homestyle Bacon  5  Decent appearance, 2nd best looking, very crunchy. Too crunchy. And too salty, only all right.

Evie:

Brand Rating (1-10) Comments
 Black Earth Meats Berkshire House Cured  2  i DONT NO WAT IS WRONG WITH IT
 Jordanal Farms Hickory Smoked, Cured  9  GOOD BUT i DiDiNT LikE iT AS MUCH AS 10
 Pernat’s Premium Meats (Venison Bacon)  2  iT TAST LikE SALOME
 D&G  Sausage Shoppe – D&G Homestyle Bacon  10  iT WAS GOOD Lik LAST YER

Ollie:

Ollie gave everything a smiley face. His only comment was on bacon #2: “Can we make this greasier?”

Overall Results:

Brand Average Rating
 Black Earth Meats Berkshire House Cured  5.2
 Jordanal Farms Hickory Smoked, Cured  7.6
 Pernat’s Premium Meats (Venison Bacon)  3.2
 D&G  Sausage Shoppe – D&G Homestyle Bacon  8.0

Baconfest 2014

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Well, it’s that time of year again. The 4th Annual Baconfest.

bacon smile

This year we have the distinction of being the first baconfest to make someone puke. So, there’s that!

It was Nathan and Amanda’s year to host, so we mostly just sat back and relaxed. I would say, overall, we seemed to have a more appropriate amount of food this year. Despite that, I still felt about as full as it is possible to feel. It felt like every time we finished cleaning up from one meal, it was time to start making the next one.

cooking bacon

First things first, we got started with a delicious bacon quiche. When all was said and done, I think the quiche was probably the best recipe of the day. It also involved a bacon-weave, which I’ve been *dying* to try for years.

Additionally, we had a bacon marmalade for our toast, which didn’t sound like the greatest thing in the world…

trying bacon jam

…but was actually surprisingly delicious!

The kids had ballet, which gave Nathan time to fry up all the bacon for the taste test.

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You know, the taste test might not seem like much, but the kids get really excited about it. I’d say it’s their favorite part of baconfest, other than perhaps waking people up with the talking bacon. Maybe it’s just because they get to do like the adults do, and their opinion counts just as much as ours does. Or maybe just because they get to eat bacon.

After all that, we felt like we could use a little exercise. Get the blood pumping through those thick, clotted arteries. Luckily it was a beautiful day, and there happened to be an enormous bike race going on right by our house. So we took lunch on the road and had a picnic, another baconfest first!

2014_05_10_9999_65

Lunch consisted of a bacon dip (don’t want those veggies spoiling baconfest!) and a sort of “reverse BLT”, where the bacon and cheese were baked into the biscuit, and only the lettuce and tomato was inside the sandwich. In other words, perfect picnic food.

Various, bacon-filled raviolis were on the menu for dinner, but first we had to make the noodles!

making noodles

I thought that was pretty fun. I’ve never made my own ravioli noodles before. The kids enjoyed it, and it was nice to have an activity in the afternoon. It took only long enough, and it was over just before the kids could get tired of it.

Finally, we ended the day with strawberry shortcake topped with bacon whipped cream. Bacon. Whipped. Cream.

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As with the marmalade, this was surprisingly delicious. I mean really good, not just “baconfest” good.

When you’re trying to come up with a bunch of bacon food ideas, you always have a couple of misses. Recipes that seem good on paper, just don’t end up all that great. Especially with desserts. However, I don’t think there was a single bad recipe in the bunch this year.

Finally, we put the kids to bed and taught ourselves how to play the ridiculously complicated, but fun, Agricola. Unfortunately, Oliver was just recovering from an absolutely awful GI virus, and I think he wasn’t quite recovered enough for all that bacon. So he gave us one last hurrah, and we had to take a pause to clean everything up.

But, despite ending on a down note, the day overall was a big success. Kudos to Nathan and Amanda for another great baconfest! I’m already starting to plan for next year.

Be prepared for baconfest related posts for the rest of the week (including lots more pictures)!

I should have made him grovel

/ Shane / Leave a comment

So, the FedEx guy threw a package over our fence. This is not news. A delivery person NOT throwing a package over the fence would be news.

But this time he forgot to scan the package before he threw it over the fence, so he had to sheepishly wait for me to come out and get the package and bring it back for him to scan.

Sara said I should have withheld it and taken a picture of him and the package, but I wasn’t that cruel.

(Except now I kind of wished I would have.)

Why you should not change your own watch battery

/ Shane / 2 Comments

When my watch ran out of batteries, I didn’t think much of it. We have a smattering of loose watch batteries, but of course none matched what I needed. It took about 4 days to get to a store to buy a replacement, and in those 4 days I probably looked at my blank wrist about 7 billion times.

Needless to say, by the time I got the battery, I was ready to get that watch fixed.

There was a little tab on the back, which I obviously needed to use to pry the back open. No matter what I did, I could not get it open. I tried all sorts of tools, but the back was so tight I couldn’t fit anything under the tab to pry with. I was having so much trouble that I actually looked up tutorials on the Internet to see if there was some mystical step that I had missed somehow. Finally I found a knife that was both thin enough to get under the tab, but strong enough to not break when I pried and got it open, but not before scratching  the back of the watch all to hell.

No worries though, it was off now, just need to switch the battery and I’m home free.

Little did I know, that the hardest part was still ahead of me. After replacing the battery the watch was working fine, but the back wouldn’t snap back on for anything. I used my fingers, my elbows, my knees. I stood on it. I tried backing it with various hard surfaces. Nothing.

Again I turned to the web, returning to my tutorial on how to change your battery. Pop the back off, replace, the battery, so far so good, then take your watch in to a jewelry store and have them replace the back. What? If I have to take my watch in, why did I go to so much trouble in the first place? They could have just done the whole thing! More furious googling. “How to change a watch battery without tools” returned hundreds of results, and they all said, “Push really hard. If that doesn’t work, go get a tool.” Thanks for that helpful tip, Internet.

At this point, I started to get a little desperate. If I couldn’t get the back on my watch, it was as good as useless anyway, so I didn’t hold back. I squeezed it with pliers. I pounded on it with a hammer. No dice, and I scratched the front of the watch all to hell.

“Why don’t you just take it in somewhere?” asked Sara. “You already changed the battery, maybe someone would just put the back on for you.”

There is some small possibility that she was right, but I can only imagine the look I would get from the bored goth at the  jewelry counter when I came to them and said, “Will you do me a solid and just find this tool and put my watch back together at no charge? Pretty please with sugar on top?” Besides, I had come this far.

After a lot of trial and error, I finally managed to put it back together with a combination of Sara holding the channel locks and me using 2 sets of needle nose pliers. Success!! Now all I have to do is…

The watch wasn’t working.

The battery wasn’t held very tight, so I figured maybe it slipped out during all the squeezing, banging, poking, and prodding. So at this point I was back to square one: open up the watch. Fortunately, I was older and wiser, and I knew just how to pop it open this time. Unfortunately, I discovered that the battery was fine; I had broken the watch.

So now I’m out the money for the battery, not to mention the stress and hassle, and I still don’t have a watch. The worst part is, if I put together my list of requirements for a new watch, they would essentially read, “My old watch”.

Next time I will do the smart thing and listen to my wife.