Mmm......Bacon.......

I love bacon. No, really, I mean it. I know that I say "I love dead cow" at least once a week and that I've been known to get glassy-eyed and publicly salivate over crispy duck breasts, but bacon.....well.....there's just nothing else like it. It's better than dead cow. Better than dead duck. Better than gin. Better than oral sex. It's even better than chocolate most of the time. If you look around out there you will find thousands of web pages devoted to Homer Simpson's favorite meat. Make sure you check out the "bacon porn" section of my favorite bacon blog when you need a reason to keep on living. I promise you, it's the only thing that got me out of bed this morning. At least it was until I saw this page where I fell in love with bacon caramels. I needed several minutes alone after reading that posting. Once you've wiped the drool from your monitor, get your ass in the kitchen and make some bacon bowls. I went the way of Not Martha and topped mine with salad, but hash browns and eggs seem to be popular fillers as well. So go on, do it. Flood your veins with glorious, golden brown, delicious bacon fat. Because you can.



Bacon Bowl Instructions

Get a muffin tin. Turn it upside down. Cover it with tin foil and spray the foil with cooking spray. In order to cover it all, you may need to tear the foil into squares. Or maybe you won't. Maybe you're better than me. Maybe you should just grow a giant boil on your face and then.....Umm....sorry......I didn't mean that. I'm sure you're a wonderful person......Continue on.....If you want actual bacon cups like the lovely ones on Not Martha, then you should use a Texas sized muffin pan. I only had the regular size muffin pan and I was happy enough with my results, but they ended up more of a bacon saucer than a bacon cup. And yet they were still delicious.

Take two strips of bacon and lay them across each other over one of the muffin cup bases to form a cross. I recommend using the thin, cheap kind of bacon that you get on sale in the center isle of the grocery. You want it thin because you are going to end up layering it and you want it to cook all the way through. Now, take another piece of bacon and weave it lattice style over, under, and around the crossed pieces of bacon to form the sides. You want a lot of over-lap because there will be shrinkage the likes of which you don't usually see outside of an unheated swimming pool in January. I cannot stress enough that you should open Not Martha's page (in another window, of course) and see her detailed, step by step, photographic instructions. I'm doing my best here, but let's face it, I've had a couple of beers.

Repeat your bacon weaving until you are out of bacon. For the regular sized muffin cups I used 3 pieces of bacon per cup and ended up with about 6 bacon "bowls". If you use the Texas sized pan, you will use 4-5 slices per cup.

Pop the pan into a 350 oven and bake til brown. Don't ask me how long, because I don't freaking know, ok? I told you, I had a couple of beers. If they don't pop right off the pan when cooled, then just lift the foil up and peel it off the inside. Put them on a plate and fill them with whatever you darn well please.


Then, in the immortal words of Homer Simpson, repeat after me: Mmm.....Bacon......



--QC

P.S.--Spoiler alert. These glorious testaments to the enduring power of porcine pleasures will be making an appearance at my Dinner Diva's party in October. Oink, oink!!