My recent bacon eating seems to have involved seafood of various types.  The pattern finally emerged last evening while having dinner with my husband and father-in-law.  We were at a famed New York City seafood establishment.  Despite all of the delectable appetizers from which to choose, I was immediately drawn to the clams casino.  Their version:  nothing but clams, bacon, and some seasoned butter.

Just a few days prior I was out for brunch with a friend at our regular place.  She’d been ordering this particular sandwich for some time now, but seeing as I don’t eat bread, I never tried the sandwich, even though it sounded delectable.  Get this: lobster, avocado, and BACON.  Rather than deny myself any longer, I ordered the sandwich sans bread.  Oh my lord, I think I made a trip to heaven that day.  I mean, bacon and avocado is heavenly in it’s own right, but add in one perfectly cooked fresh lobster tail.  Almost too much to take!  In addition to the sandwich, we shared not one, but two side orders of bacon with our unlimited champagne.  Just to make sure we ate enough bacon.

Having made this connection, it is obvious, at least to me, that I must make myself some bacon-wrapped shrimp for dinner.  The seafood+bacon equation is thus fully proven!

Signs from the Union Square Farmers’ Market last week:

Mmmmmmmm………bacon!

Have you ever thought to yourself, “I wish I could carry a meat or meat-like product with me all the time”? Ever thought it would be neat to have a slab of meat play back all your favorite meat music? Ever wanted to pull out a slab of meat from your pocket and say, “it was a slab of meat in my pocket and and I’m glad to see you”?

Well, now you’ve got the chance. Wired brings news of this iPod case from Japan. It even comes in a shrink wrapped butcher’s package. The price is a bit steep at roughly $88, but Wired’s already made the Kobe beef joke.

Chow.com has a feature on Southern-style Passover Seders:

Children of Israel, come south. Marcie Cohen Ferris, author of Matzoh Ball Gumbo, wants to set you free from matzoh ball soup and gefilte fish. With her background in both Jewish studies and the Southern Foodways Alliance, she has combined Jewish traditions with Southern flavors for a delicious new spin on Passover. We’ve crafted this menu using recipes from Ferris’s book; make one dish or cook up the whole thing.

[link courtesy of future meatblogger, Michele]

We could tell you the truth: that life got complicated in strange ways for most of us all at once and the meatblog suffered for it, but that’s boring.

So instead, you are encouraged to believe that we haven’t been posting because we all got together for a meatblog teambuilding retreat. One thing led to another and we ended up going on a bender. Bacon cocktails (previously posted here) made, of course, with bacon vodka, led to An Unfortunate Incident. The results of this incident, and one of the conditions of our bail, prevented us from blogging for a while. I’ll let your fevered little imaginations take care of the rest of the details.

That’s much more entertaining than the truth, now, isn’t it?

The Linkmeister found this excellent (?) item, which we submit for your approval: the bacon bra!

(And if you approve of this item, please don’t tell us. What you do in the privacy of your own home is your business)

Being unable to eat the holy grail of meat, the Voges bacon chocolate bar, due to my inability to eat sugar, I decided to try a home experiment. Take a good quality bacon and coat it in a good quality sugar free chocolate. Here’s everything waiting to spring into action:

We’ve got the cast iron skillet for cooking the bacon, proper bacon cooking must be done in a cast iron skillet. We’ve got a small pan for melting the chocolate. Some Vermont Smoke and Cure bacon that seemed all gourmet like, but was found in the regular supermarket. La Nouba fine Belgian sugar free milk chocolate. And last, but not least wax paper for cooling the final product.

All set to go, I opened the bacon package only to discover that the bacon was not pre-sliced. It was just one big beautiful slab of smokey pork goodness. I’d never had to deal with such a thing, but without freaking out too much, I broke out the big ass chef’s knife and started slicing.

Now slicing isn’t my forte, so as you can see, the pieces I was left with weren’t exactly neat slices. But hey, maybe that would just lend more charm to the final product. The slices were, though, nice and thick, and that would be a good thing for sure.

So we’ve got the bacon slices done, and they hit the nice pre-heated skillet. Mmmmm….nothing like the smell and sound of bacon sizzling in the pan.

Not perfectly shaped, but perfectly cooked and transfered to paper towels to cool and drain (looks like a little bacon Rorschach test, no?).

Chocolate melting was the easy part, just put the chocolate in the small pan and heat slowly until melted.

Disgusting looking but effective. After the chocolate was melted and the bacon cooled off, I dredged the bacon through the melted chocolate, using my fingers to assure and even coating. This was much more difficult than I had imagined. Some bacon and some chocolate wound up being eaten rather than combined. At the end of this ridiculous experiment, here is what I was left with:

Four turd-looking pieces of chocolate coated smoky Vermont bacon, laid out on a piece of wax paper to dry. Except despite leaving them to cool for what seemed like forever, the chocolate never really hardened back up. I suppose putting it in the fridge would have helped, but I kinda thought that would ruin the bacon somehow. Perhaps the sugar free chocolate isn’t as versatile as it’s sugared counterpart.

In any event, I wound up eating the crispy strips with mostly molten chocolate still covering them. Delicious? Not quite. Good? Yep. Interesting? Definitely. Try it again? Never. That’s not to say you shouldn’t try it at home and share your results with us. We’d love to hear from you.

Over at Gourmet, John T. Edge thinks back fondly to childhood meals of squirrel and details a stew he made with some Fox Squirrels.

I knew of Edge’s work at the Oxford American and some of his other writing, but I didn’t know about the hotdog stand:

John T. Edge is director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. He is a contributing editor at Gourmet and writes for a number of other publications including the Oxford American and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Edge is editor of the forthcoming foodways volume of the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and is author of a number of books, including an expanded and revised paperback edition of Southern Belly from Algonquin Books. For a brief and shining moment, he ran a hotdog stand on the Oxford square, serving pimento-cheese-capped natural-casing dogs. He called the business Dunce Dogs, an homage to Ignatius J. Reilly, anti-hero protagonist of the novel Confederacy of Dunces.

The man had a hotdog stand with a name that paid homage to Confederacy of Dunces. That’s a detail so nerdtastic I don’t have any other comment on it other than, wow!

Long before the dawn of the meatblog, Husband and I would ponder that eternal question, “Who was the first to sell a doughnut burger? The nice folks at A Hamburger Today, one of the Serious Eats spinoff blogs, have been posting on the subject for a nice long time. So rather than write my own post, I’m going to be lazy and refer you to their archive of posts about Doughnut Burgers.

Happy reading!

Yesterday was chicken-fried steak, today is chicken-friend bacon. The chicken-fried fun just never ends!