Bacon is the new black

What do cocoa and Babe have in common? You can eat them both in one delicious candy bar. That’s right, chocolate with bacon in it. I can’t make this up.

Recently an angel flew down from heaven and said unto me, “Ye shall eat of the pleasure that is this sweet-savory-someone-put-breakfast-in-my-candy delight.” And let me tell you, it’s so wrong it’s right. (I'm sorry, that rhyme is creepy.)

Think about it— what can’t bacon make better? I can think of nothing except maybe...Veggie burgers? No, still better with bacon. The constitution? No, still better with bacon. Underwear? No, still better with bacon. Iraq? No, still better with bacon. I give up. Ok, maybe the weight-bearing walls of a structural design.

But while our chocolate is allying with our salty breakfast meat, where else can this bacon trend go?

-Bacon Martini

-Bacon cookies
-Bacon first aid

My meat ignorance, Part II

What is pastrami and why did I buy it? These questions will haunt me for the rest of my life.

I’m pretty new on the deli meat scene. Walking up to a deli counter and asking for a pre-determined weight of something is still a weird experience in my book. I decided it was time to veer from the safe and narrow turkey path. No, not to smoked turkey, but to…. pastrami?!

It looked like a real meat’s meat. Ya know? But it wins the award for meat that’s actual deliciousness is inversely proportional to how delicious it appears. It looks really delicious. Need I say more, math majors?

I still don’t really understand what it is. I decided it must be cut from the least delicious part of the animal. (the shoulder?) Dictionary.com says it’s “a brisket of beef that has been cured in a mixture of garlic, peppercorns, sugar, coriander seeds, etc., then smoked before cooking.” That sounds exactly how I like my women. And my meat.

But I guess in life we just don’t know what we want.

My meat ignorance, Part I

This will probably come as a shock, but there's a lot I don't know about meat.

I mean... I know where it comes from. And it's not the same place as babies. Well, at least not directly. But this volume of "My meat ignorance," the first part of an ongoing series, providing many "that's what she said" opportunities to my eager and mature audience, will focus on sausage.

Back when I lived in the Midwest, at breakfast time, sausage came in two forms: patty and finger-sized link. Here in NYC, sausage only seems to come in one form: dinosaur-serious-SERIOUS-you-can-definitely-tell-a-butcher-stuffed-indiscriminate-animal-parts-into-some-intestinal-tract-and-tied-it-off-like-a-balloon-animal.

This may be better sausage, more legit sausage, a more keepin' it real and true to da streets kind of sausage. But it scares the crap out of me! Maybe not all NY sausage is like this. After receiving these ginormo-links from the kitchen of a diner voted "BEST RESTAURANT IN QUEENS 1998," there's no way I'm making that mistake twice. I just can't handle that kind of sausage.