ON BACON AND MAN FOOD...

A friend of mine is a "man food" maestro. He is king of wings, a topper in poppers and the chief of beef. Where we really cross passions is in bacon. He sends me items he finds from lurking on, who knows how many, blogs and websites. So a few weeks ago he sends me this recipe, can't even remember the name now, but it was breakfast sausage filled with chopped bacon and cheese and wrapped in, you guessed it, Bacon. My arteries were seizing as I read the recipe, but I couldn't stop reading mostly because of one phrase: "take the bacon weave and carefully wrap it around the sausage roll up..." Bacon Weave????? A new phrase immediately entered my lexicon and I went to applying this manly textile in as many places as I could. Mike had previously sent me a recipe for the "Alien Probe" which was sausage wrapped around an Anaheim pepper stuffed with cheese and smoked for a couple of hours. Meat perfection it was...until we wrapped it in the best fabric of all... the bacon weave. What was manly and awesome became somehow more manly and awesomer with the simple addition of the weave. J-BAR-H Catering fed the men of the Frank Danna Man Bash last weekend and amid the sliced sirloin sandwiches, smoked & grilled bologna sandwiches, jalapeno poppers and buffalo wings, the Bacon Weave Wrapped Alien Probe stood head and shoulders above the rest...


So why is that? Why is bacon such a manly food? And why did I go through 10 pounds of bacon in barbeculinary research? I think like so many other things guys do...bacon is bad for us. Isn't that where our most fun comes from? Jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, running with the bulls (ask Diana about THAT one!) eating 6 pound, hamburgers and entering food eating contests. If it can kill us, then it is fun. The faster it can kill us the more we will pay to do it.


So with that in mind I tried to take the bacon weave to new heights. Where could we go with this? I decided that I also wanted to mess with a personal sized bacon weave and had a lot of fun with it. When you cut the strips in half long ways and then width wise they become the perfect size for a one up and when draped over an upside down muffin pan become little bowls of goodness. First thing that came to mind was spinach salad in a bacon bowl, then I moved to spring salad, then of course flattened out it became a perfect woven topping for breakfast.
There just really was no end to what a man can do with bacon...it's everything that manly food should be.