Crickets Chirping

Eric sent me this (warning?) today:

Sometimes I wander around a store for hours before I realize they don’t sell bacon. Or groceries of any kind.

Inspired by this comment:

I’m VB for sure.

How to make Bacon Tortilla Soup

Wake up with a hankering for something to eat that doesn’t come in a box. Head down to the Divisadero Farmer’s Market to check out the goods. Get some heirloom tomatoes. Marvel at their psychedelic phenotypes. Also get some peppers of various hotness, some onions, garlic and cilantro.

Then walk down to Lucky’s to pick up some organic chicken stock, chicken breasts and bacon (yes, it’s organic too). Head home.

Arrange food items for a family portrait. It will be their last.

Prepare apartment for the cloud of Bacon smoke that is about to invade it. Then cook the bacon. Eat it. Then cook some more and leave it on a paper towel to drain. Start grilling two chicken breasts in a pan with some olive oil.

Whoah there.

You okay? Did you stare at the patterns on the tomatoes for too long?

HEY! It’s important to suppress these flashbacks because you are standing very close to an open flame.

Take a deep breath and wait for that feeling that you’re hovering three feet above your body to subside.

After you cut all the fractals off the heirloom tomatoes, core and dice them. Set these aside in a bowl.

Dice the onions and peppers, and chop the garlic up into itsy bitsy pieces. Cry from the onions, but don’t touch your eyes- you’ve been handling jalapenos! Oh Noes! You did? Okay, just remember this lesson when you have to go to the bathroom in a few minutes because it actually is possible for your comfort level to decrease, even at it’s current miserably low point.

Buck up little solider! Pour two turns around the pan of olive oil and saute the peppers, onions and garlic.

Take the two chicken breasts that you’ve been grilling on the other burner and shred them. Put them into a pot.

Add onions, peppers, garlic and crubmled BACON. Realize that this pot is FULL and you haven’t even added the chicken stock or tomatoes. So get out another pot and parallelize this operation! Add chicken stock and tomatoes to both pots. Put one can of black beans in one of the pots for variation A, and chop up some cilantro to add to the other pot for variation B.

Bring to a boil, then simmer for a couple of hours.

Enjoy variation A, but realize that you can taste the can that the black beans came from. Grumble, but finish the bowl because it’s friggin delicious anyways.

Variation B hits the spot. Twitter and blog about it.

Now freeze the leftovers in single serving containers just like Grandma used to. Except without the corn and tortilla strips because you’re trying to cut corn out of your diet. Not for health reasons, but just because you don’t like corn.

see here (probably NSFW).

Several people have sent this link (or variations on it) to me over the last week or so, but I neglected to blog about it for a couple of reasons. First, lots of other people were blogging about it and I didn’t really have anything to add. Second, I have some problems with it.

Don’t get me wrong. I love cooked bacon, but raw bacon is pretty gross. It’s quite unappetizing, even when draped over an otherwise lovely female form.

Furthermore, there’s something deeply disturbing about a woman covering her naughty bits with raw meat. Look at the picture again but this time think about the situation that led to this photo being taken.

The girl, the party, how she ended up there with her shirt off. “To attract men?” Does her “prank” belie a darker truth? Worn down by a life-long onslaught of sexist messages, has she come to believe that her value as a human being worthy of love is defined by her physical appearance? Cruel adolescent remarks about her body stuck in her mind. If nobody would love her with her own fat on the inside, might they love her with another animal’s fat draped on her outside?

Or consider the harshly lit supermarket where the bacon was purchased, the smog-belching truck that brought it there. The cold, grimy cutting equipment of the slaughterhouse where it was sliced and packaged. The cramped pen where the pig once lived in misery. A horrific supply chain stretching from breakfast plate to slaughterhouse. Every bite I take pulls on that chain, pulls another living creature through its awful machinery.

Here’s my meditation on the bacon bra: Simultaneously mindful of the both the life of suffering that animal experienced before its slaughter, and the damage done to women everywhere by this type of objectifying imagery, I am forced to reconsider my desire to consume either. I don’t want any of that in my stomach or my mind.

Oh.

Marry me, bacon bra girl.

This ain’t a bad place to work. (sorry for two bacon-related posts in a row)

Carol and Vance are my new best friends. They sent me two bacon chocolate pigs.

Delicious.

Thank you!!!

And I thought I was the only one who’d eat chocolate covered bacon.

(thanks, Adam)

Mandi Squeak alerted me to WaPo Acticle about some guys who ripped off one of my favorite recipes: