BLTs and the Bacon Didn’t Fail
I don’t always chat about my cooking failures on this blog. How interesting would that be? (I hear you snickering out there.) But I’ll tell you now about a little bacon mishap I had a few weeks back.
One night I prepared an egg recipe for dinner that included shredded zucchini and eggs. I don’t recall which magazine it was from, but it wasn’t something I just made up from childhood memories. I knew that Joe and I would probably like the dish, but I expected a negative reaction from my other diners. That’s why I decided to improve the plate in their eyes by preparing a maple glazed bacon recipe from the same magazine. It involved cooking thick slab bacon in the roasting oven and every so often basting it with maple syrup. Easy, right? Every time I opened the oven to apply the glaze, the house was filled with the mouth watering scent of cooking bacon. As I pulled out the pan to baste the slices, the girls couldn’t wait to get their hands on those strips.
The bacon was taking a while to cook because of the thickness of the slices, and I needed the oven to finish cooking the zucchini and eggs. So I moved the bacon to the baking oven, the lower temp oven in my Aga, and promptly forgot to check on it as I prepared the table for dinner and cleaned up the dirty prep pieces.
I pulled the cooked zucchini and eggs from the roasting oven – hungry sounds of oooh and aaaah, were NOT heard in my kitchen. I moved to the baking oven and pulled out the bacon, the much coveted, now thoroughly blackened bacon – OOOOOOOOOOGH, AAAAAAAAAAACK was heard throughout the house. In the time that it had been forgotten, the sugars in the maple syrup burned on the slices and with the slices. Nobody held back their vicious comments about how I had burned the bacon, I had failed! In fact, Annie took heart from this failure, seeing that even an experienced cook could fail.
Do you know how much we wanted that bacon? It looked extra desirable in contrast to the zucchini and eggs. So each of us picked out whichever strips of bacon seemed least charred and ate them anyway. Joe went so far as to say they weren’t ruined. Right. Trying to get in my good graces, dear? I see right through you.
After this disaster I had to prove that I was capable of cooking bacon without burning it. Which brings us to the BLTs we had for dinner this week. The BLTs with the perfectly cooked bacon. But you know what? Those BLTs weren’t about the bacon at all. They were about the perfect tomato slices that came from the tomato plant out back. The perfect combination of the ripe, garden fresh tomato and the perfectly cooked bacon on the toasted Italian bread proved I wasn’t a cooking failure after all.
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I’ve had cooking failures too but the disapointment is fleeting especially if it is followed by a tasty satisfying success. All of my most epic cooking failures only live on as humorous anecdotes.
I hate undercooked, rubbery bacon and definitely favor over-cooked bacon so I wouldn’t have thought you failed at all.
Well, Mike, maybe someday you can write a guest post and share one of those humorous anecdotes.
Uh, Zoogirl, this was more than over-cooked. Over-cooked is putting it nicely.
Let’s just say the bacon was “planking”
Yeah, but it’s going to be extra impressive when the bacon is leisure diving, the successor of planking according to this morning’s “Today Show.”