The subject
Ham is a relatively simple food, just like bacon. However--again, just like bacon--even though it consists of just a few ingredients (pork, salt and/or sugar, maybe some spices), the quality of specimens bearing that name can vary widely. On the low end of the spectrum, there's the cheap stuff your mom used to buy for your lunchbox sandwiches every week because it was always on sale, and a brand currently found largely in small neighborhood grocery stores called, we kid you not, "Fud." On the high end, there's the fresh ham we had at Andersonville's sublime Southern-food joint
Big Jones, and the Boar's Head stuff found in the deli case. Not sure what those people do to their meats, but it sure is tasty. As Cleveland Jones, deli owner on Fox's
The Family Guy, once remarked, "That Boar's Head pretty much sells itself." We bought some at our neighborhood mercado and wrapped it in bacon.
Side note: The legendary Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters are a pro ball team in Japan. The name comes not from any tendency to get combative with salted pork; rather, they're owned by Nippon Ham, one of the country's largest food-processing companies. Still, the team name is one of our all-time favorites--right up there with the Lansing Lugnuts and Toledo Mudhens minor-league outfits.
The resultsWas there ever a doubt? When salted pork is coupled with more salted pork, only good things happen. In fact, we foresee gracing our next holiday table with a TurDucKen-like pork-within-pork concoction. Maybe a nice tenderloin stuffed with ham and wrapped with bacon. *drool*
The conclusion: Bacon + ham = all kinds of awesome
Good morning, my bacon-loving children! I'm Porcina, the Bacon Fairy, guest-blogging on BDJ today. I just wanted to let you know that while the staff of BDJ Labs is sleeping off their bacontini and bacon Mary hangovers this morning, I'm leaving them a fridge full of delicious, magical bacon, so that they can perform their crazy bacon experiments every day for the next week, at the very least. Isn't that wonderful? La la la. I'm a fairy! La la la.
After the minor disappointment that was the Third Pound Angus Bacon Burger from a certain fast-food establishment (no names, but it rhymes with Schmick Schmonald's), we decided to try the new Bacon Deluxe from Wendy's. In a word: it's awesome. While we fully acknowledge no sandwich could ever have enough bacon on it to satisfy our appetite for salty pork strips, we do have to admit that this sandwich does better than most in delivering the bacon boom.
We at BDJ are sick of bacon getting a bad rap. Top Chef winner Richard Blais declared via his Twitter status on Oct 14 that bacon is "overrated." Flippant news commentators refer to H1N1 as "bacon pox." We won't even go into how a certain parent of one BDJ lab staffer uses her Facebook page to deliver motherly grief over the bacon love. No respect.
So agua de coco is (as the kids might say) the shit right now. Popular in Brazil, Panama, and pretty much every other tropical nation, the beverage is catching fire here, thanks to a growing latino market, and the desire of caucasian people to increase their coolness by broadening their flavor palate. Agua de coco is the liquid sloshing around inside a fresh coconut and shouldn't be confused with coconut milk (which is loaded with fat and obtained by smushing the actual coconut meat). If you're lucky enough to live near a decent latino market, you might find a cart vendor that sells fresh-out-of-the-coconut stuff; if not, you can buy in cans like we usually do. If you've never had it, we definitely recommend it--it's sweet but not overpoweringly so, surprisingly light, and provides a nice change of pace from soda (but, at about 80 calories a serving and free from icky corn syrup, much better for you).
Ham is a relatively simple food, just like bacon. However--again, just like bacon--even though it consists of just a few ingredients (pork, salt and/or sugar, maybe some spices), the quality of specimens bearing that name can vary widely. On the low end of the spectrum, there's the cheap stuff your mom used to buy for your lunchbox sandwiches every week because it was always on sale, and a brand currently found largely in small neighborhood grocery stores called, we kid you not, "Fud." On the high end, there's the fresh ham we had at Andersonville's sublime Southern-food joint Big Jones, and the Boar's Head stuff found in the deli case. Not sure what those people do to their meats, but it sure is tasty. As Cleveland Jones, deli owner on Fox's The Family Guy, once remarked, "That Boar's Head pretty much sells itself." We bought some at our neighborhood mercado and wrapped it in bacon.