bacon

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!

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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)!

Just like her mama

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Sara has a strange weakness for magazines. They are her kryptonite: for some reason she just cannot get rid of them. She pages through each one, carefully folding the corners down on the pages she wants to “save for later”, and then sets the magazine aside, never to be opened again.

Even when I find them 3 years later and point out that this stack of magazines hasn’t been looked at for 3 years, some kind of hoarders instinct kicks in, and we still have to keep them. The compromise is that Sara went through all the old magazines and ripped out the pages with folded over corners, reducing the volume of paper we are required to save by about 99%. Unfortunately though, the chance of anyone ever looking at them again is still 0%.

Imagine my horror when I discovered Evie paging through spare magazines and folding down corners. Could this actually be genetic? How am I going to live in a house with TWO people saving magazines? However, it was fascinating going through them all after she went to bed. She folded down so many pages, and it was just so interesting to see what she thought was worth saving in the magazine. Seriously, psychologists should do this as some kind of personality study.

Evie’s selections were decidedly bizarre, such as this picture of a cat holding its privates, folded over at least twice in two different magazines:

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In general, Evie’s selections tended towards pre-packaged junk food with dozens of those pages folder over, such as Keebler cookies:

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She did select some clothing though, such as this black leather shirt:

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But there was at least one selection to make her daddy’s heart proud…a pound of uncooked bacon:

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The Zombie Preparedness Initiative

/ Shane / 5 Comments

Of course, we all know how valuable bacon would be in the case of a zombie apocalypse (the correct answer being “more valuable than gold”). This very topic was discussed at Baconfest in regards to the Tactical Bacon. Commenter Victor Tookes was quick to point out this post on How to Make Bacon Post Apocalypse.

This article is great, with some fantastic quotes:

There is no reason that the walking dead should stop humanity from enjoying it’s crowning culinary achievement.

and

Pigs are fantastic, magical animals, they turn vegetables into bacon.

Tell me that is not just *dying* to be put on a tee-shirt.

However, the informative bacon posts are just the beginning! It is well worth looking around the rest of the Zombie Preparedness Initiative’s website!

Hours and hours of things to read there. Important, life saving things. Keep in mind, this is the only zombie organization specifically inspired by Shaun of the Dead. And if that doesn’t make them serious enough, they have an .org extension on their webpage. They are an organization people!

An important organization with an important mission. I want all of you to study up. We’ll each have our roles to play, and we don’t have room on the team for any slackers.

Baconfest 2013, In Pictures

/ Shane / 1 Comment

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Baconfest 2013, Taste Test

/ Shane / 3 Comments

Of course, the main feature of baconfest is the annual taste test. We had a nice collection of bacons this year. We didn’t get as many sort of rare or local varieties as I would have liked (especially compared to last year), but overall I thought everything was really good. It was a pretty wide range of flavors and appearances.

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Nathan:

Brand Rating (1-10) Comments
Boar’s Head (Smoked)  5  Good crisp – Light
Sobie Meats  6  A lot more tasty fat (by tasty I mean full body) thicker cut but still a crunch.
Nueske’s (Wild Cherrywood Smoked)  4  All the fat was at the end instead of throughout
ThinkGeek Tactical Bacon  2  super thing – nice for crunch but lacked flavor
Trader Joe’s Black Forrest Bacon (dry rubbed)  5  very similar to #1. A good flavor, very light.

Amanda:

Brand Rating (1-10) Comments
Boar’s Head (Smoked)  7  Sweet. Thin. I liked the crispiness
Sobie Meats  2  Very meaty taste is strong. Like fish.
Nueske’s (Wild Cherrywood Smoked)  5  Smokey & salty
ThinkGeek Tactical Bacon  6  Not much flavor. A good breakfast bacon.
Trader Joe’s Black Forrest Bacon (dry rubbed)  7  Taste is very different in a good way. I like how thin it is.

Sara:

Brand Rating (1-10) Comments
Boar’s Head (Smoked)  8  thin (which is nice), no overpowering flavors which is also nice
Sobie Meats  5  blah. has sort of a stale flavor, a little chewy
Nueske’s (Wild Cherrywood Smoked)  7.5  a little sweet, a little salty, tastes liek a delicious campfire
ThinkGeek Tactical Bacon  4  I confess to recognizing this one. Honestly, it tastes like nothing, which is better than I expected. The texture is fine
Trader Joe’s Black Forrest Bacon (dry rubbed)  6  Has a subtly sweet flavor. Not bad, nothing fantastic either. Also, thin in a good way.

2013_04_06_9899Shane:

Brand Rating (1-10) Comments
Boar’s Head (Smoked)  5  average bacon, decent taste, bacon size was a little uneven
Sobie Meats  8  good appearance, just the right amount of fatty, good after taste, a little smokey
Nueske’s (Wild Cherrywood Smoked)  9  great flavor, salty, little fatty
ThinkGeek Tactical Bacon  2  blech
Trader Joe’s Black Forrest Bacon (dry rubbed)  8  good taste, a little different, more tough than I usually like, but it all came together for me

Evie:

Brand Rating (1-10) Comments
Boar’s Head (Smoked)  6  smiley face
Sobie Meats  1  frowny face
Nueske’s (Wild Cherrywood Smoked)  2  unsure face
ThinkGeek Tactical Bacon  10  smiley face
Trader Joe’s Black Forrest Bacon (dry rubbed)  8  smiley face

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Overall Results:

Brand Average Rating Average Rating (with Evie)
Boar’s Head (Smoked)  6.25  6.2
Sobie Meats  5.25  4.4
Nueske’s (Wild Cherrywood Smoked)  6.375  5.5
ThinkGeek Tactical Bacon  3.5  4.8
Trader Joe’s Black Forrest Bacon (dry rubbed)  6.5  6.8

Very, very close this year. I can’t believe that Trader Joe’s bacon has won 2 out of 3 years! That’s crazy. It’s also interesting that the winner didn’t change with the inclusion of Evie’s rankings.

Ollie’s ballot was exactly what you would think Ollie’s ballet would be, each one signed with an “O” to be sure there was no hanky panky.

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I would like to talk for a minute about the Tactical Bacon from ThinkGeek.

Even though it lost pretty badly, everyone was very impressed with the TacBac. This can of bacon has been sitting in my pantry for more than THREE YEARS. Sara was so disgusted by the idea of it, that she couldn’t even look at the can. And given all that, i would put it up against any of the “precooked” bacons on the market. It was remarkable, and certainly worth eating in the case of a zombie apocalypse. In fact, you’ll notice Evie gave it a full 10! I think this is probably because she doesn’t like strong tastes and it has a pretty muted flavor, but nonetheless, if anybody can give old bacon from a can a 10, I think we’ve got a winner. (Full disclosure, I did drop the slices in the bacon grease from one of the other bacons to better disguise it.)