So when John and I started this blog, we thought it would be sort of cool to put up food stories and perspectives from different towns in Michigan and North Carolina.

Well, I’m moving. To Paris. It’s only temporary (6 months), but it’s still going to be awesome and I’m going to eat a lot of butter.

"France is Bacon"...in Todd's stomach

You can follow all my wacky antics here on epicportions.com and those of my fiance on her new blog - The Hungry Butterfly.  I’m going to eat.  She is going to cook.

In fact, she is going to cook very, very well since she is now a student at Le Cordon Bleu Paris, the most famous cooking school in the world, and the alma mater of Julia Child, Mario Batali, and my nerdy grillin’ hero, Steve Raichlen.  She’s getting a culinary diploma – 9 hours a day, 6 days a week.  I will be standing outside with a fork, knife, bib, and camera.  So Stay Tuned!

P.S. Image stolen from one of my favorite blogs – the Map Room.

Yeah, that’s right: Bacon S’mores.  Chocolate-covered candied bacon smothered in marshmallow in a graham cracker crust.

I can’t take credit for this idea, and actually I’m not sure I would want to.  A friend tweeted about The Complete Sale of Selma Lee posting about Chewbacca Bars, which they also call Chunky Chewies.  I immediately started telling my friends about them, calling them bacon s’mores, until someone pointed out the lack of graham. So of course,  I added graham! Below is my own recipe, which is extraordinarily similar to others’ recipes, except where I made some changes.

Start with one pound of thick-cut, peppered bacon. Cut the uncooked slices into quarters or even sixths, and marinate the pieces for a few hours (in the fridge!) in equal parts balsamic vinegar and maple syrup (the real stuff, none of that Mrs Jemima gunk.) Coat with brown sugar and more pepper, and bake on a wire rack on a LINED baking sheet at 350F until delicious. I didn’t time it. If you are someone who can leave baking bacon well enough alone, good for you. I stuck my head in there to smell it every, oh, ten seconds, so it took a while to bake but it was easy to tell when it was done.

Here is some delicious, marinated bacon ready to bake:

And here is what happens if you don’t line your baking sheet with tinfoil.

SERIOUSLY, I have been soaking and scrubbing my baking sheet since Sunday and it hasn’t come clean yet.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you to line it.

When the bacon is done, remove it from the oven and move it to a plate to cool.  Melt about 2 1/2 cups chocolate – I used dark, but it’s up to you – in a double boiler, and when the bacon is sufficiently cool, dump it in and fold it in to coat. Really coat it. No wimpy half-coated pieces here. Place a greased wire rack on a large amount of newspaper in an area of your kitchen that you don’t much need to make other things, and dump the chocolate-covered bacon onto it to set. Let it set. Stop eating it, just let it set.

Meanwhile, take 2 of the 3 packets of graham crackers that come in a normal sized box, and make really fine crumbs out of them. I did this using freezer bags and a rolling pin and beating them into submission. You can also use a food processor, but the rolling pin method is actually quite fun! Place 1/2 of the crumbs into a glass 9×11″ baking dish, and set the other half aside.

Now, you make marshmallow. Yes, you make it from scratch, because homemade marshmallow is god’s gift to the world and about 427times better than store-bought. Really. I used Joy of Baking’s recipe and I used it verbatim*, because everyone warned me it was really gooey and kind of difficult. It is really gooey, but it actually cleans up pretty easily with just water, and it is not that difficult.

1 cup cold water
3/4 oz unflavored gelatin (usually comes in 1/4oz packets, 4 packets in a box)
2 cups white sugar
1 cup light corn syrup
1/4 tspn salt (I use popcorn salt)
2 tspn vanilla extract

Put 1/2 cup cold water into a large, clean metal bowl. Sprinkle the gelatin over the water and let stand until gelatin softens, about 15 minutes.  Meanwhile, place the sugar, corn syrup, salt, and remaining 1/2 cup cold water into a saucepan. Cook, stirring, over medium heat until sugar dissolves and the mixture comes to a boil. Attach a candy thermometer to the side of the pan and boil on high heat until the syrup reaches 240F, about 10 minutes.  With mixer running (it helps to have about three hands at this point) pour the hot syrup into the water-gelatin bowl. Add the vanilla. Gradually increase the speed of your mixer to high and beat the mixture until it turns into marshmallow cream. Try not to cut off your fingers with the mixer when you are sticking them into the bowl to taste it.  Be prepared to stand there for awhile – the recipe says 10 min, but mine took 15 min or more. It will grow, so be sure to use a big bowl.  It will also taste really good, like even better than you are expecting, so don’t eat it all with your fingers (if they’re still attached.)

NOW – chop the chocolate covered bacon into bite-sized pieces and set aside. Pour 1/2 of the marshmallow cream into your crumb-prepared baking dish, and put the chocolate-covered bacon on top. Add the remaining marshmallow and sprinkle the other half of the graham crumbs on top.  Allow to set for a few hours – I gave it four hours but sped it up a bit in the fridge, and it was fine.

It will look delicious and pretty like this:

… and it will be divisive.  My sister says chocolate-covered bacon is the most disgusting thing she can think of;  fair-goers across America think it’s a wonderful treat.  Everyone who tried a piece liked it, but only one went back for seconds. I thought it was good.  I think most things made with bacon and most things made with marshmallow are good.  Chocolate doesn’t hurt.

Will you like bacon s’mores?  Only one way to find out!

*verbatim? OK, so not really. I don’t really do verbatim. But I came pretty close this time… I doubled the recipe because I needed extra to make s’mores cakes for the vegetarians and the Muslim (blog post to come) and I also used a hand mixer instead of the recommended stand mixer, because I don’t own a stand mixer. But otherwise: totally verbatim.

Regardless of who won the Super Bowl and how much Peyton Manning choked after watching close to 3,000 hours of film in the two weeks leading up to it, neither team got what really mattered this Super Bowl season. The food I cooked really didn’t matter either, because I didn’t get what really mattered. The guys over at BBQaddicts.com decided to truly top the game, the commercials, and any other simple food anyone else made and put together a truly epic Bacon Lombardi Trophy. I am truly embarrassed about the meal I made after seeing this creation.  I apologize to everyone that came to my Super Bowl party for not creating one of these.

Brilliance in bacon, I say.

I’m not much of a burger guy.  Wait, yes I am.  It’s just hard to find a good burger these days.  Restaurant burgers are always bland, and fast food burgers just aren’t burgers.  The only legit ones these days come from hole in the wall joints who boast a grill that’s been seasoned for years.  I’ve never gotten homemade burgers to taste the way I want, mainly because I haven’t tried very hard.  My homemade burger experience mainly consists of buying a package of ground chuck from the grocery store, seasoning the shit out of it, and throwing it in a pan.  The results haven’t been too great.

This past week I set out to change my homemade burger woes.  I was going to do everything in my power to make the closest thing to a perfect burger I could without a seasoned grill.  This wasn’t going to be an easy task.  The logical first step was to figure out the meats I would use.  I knew that chuck was the best type of beef to use, due to it’s fat content, but while it will make a juicy burger it definitely lacks in flavor.  I decided that adding sirloin was the only option.  The chuck would bring the fat to the party, and the sirloin would show up fashionably late and bring the flavor.  Together, they would make one incredible burger.

Meet sirloin and chuck. They are here to party.

Bringing chuck and sirloin to the party wasn’t the only thing I had to do.  Oh no.  These were perfect burgers I was making.  As you can see from the picture above, I purchased a cut of each and decided that I was going to grind my own meat.  I didn’t want some store bought beef bag that could possibly come from 100 different cows.  This way, I know where my meat is coming from.  Well, kind of.

I don’t own a meat grinder, but I do own the next best thing which is a food processor.  I had heard for some time that a food processor will give you a different consistency than a grinder but generally it works just as well.  I decided this was good enough for me since I don’t have $150 to drop on a meat grinder.

With a food processor all all you need to do is some really simple preparation, then let it do the work.  I started by trimming some of the fat off of the cuts.  Fat not only means flavor, but a juicy burger as well, so I left a good amount on.  I then cut the meat into cubes and left them in the freezer for an hour or so.  Unless you want ground beef that resembles what your cat eats, this is an important step.  After the freezing process, 6 or 7 cubes went into the food processor per “grind”, and pulsed 15-20 times.  Do I have to explain why you don’t want to puree your beef?  I don’t believe so.

After you pulse/chop up all of the beef cubes, you should have a bowl of goodness that looks something like the following picture.  Beautiful.  I added a little salt, pepper, minced garlic, and seasoning salt, but I figured the beef would do most of the talking.

At this point, it wasn’t enough that I had freshly ground beef.  For some reason I went a little nuts.  This is a reoccurring issue with me.  I decided the only way to prepare these burgers was to stuff them with random things I had in my refrigerator and freezer.  I hadn’t gone shopping in some time, so this ended up being one of those “Hey, I wonder what this will taste like” kind of moments.

The first burger was pretty simple and only stuffed with a bit of Gorgonzola cheese.

The next burger was a little crazier, but still nothing big.  I decided that a Cheddar cheese and bacon burger was a requirement.

This is when things started to get a little crazy.  In my kitchen, there are always have plenty of pierogies.  I can’t get enough of them.  For some reason, I thought pierogies would be a perfect thing to put inside a burger.  Observe, a pierogi burger.

If a pierogie burger wasn’t weird enough already, I remembered that I had a bag of pizza rolls in the freezer.  Yes, the pizza roll burger was born.

After I completely ruined my idea to make burgers out of flavorful beef by stuffing them with the most random products I could get my hands on, I had to somehow make these monsters into actual burgers.  It took a long time, but I finally got the patties to actually resemble a burger.  They may look like brontosaurus burgers, but these babies are legit.

From there the burgers went onto a HOT cast iron skillet for about 3 minutes on each side and then into the oven on 350 for about 5-7 minutes.  I had never made burgers of this kind before, so I figured some time in the oven would do them well.

After the time on the skillet, these things were starting to look beautiful.  The Cheddar and bacon burger was starting to come apart a little bit, but no big deal.  Nothing was oozing out of the sides.  I couldn’t exactly get the grill marks I was looking for, but things were looking good.

Now that the burgers were cooked, the logical next step was to cut them in half so there would be room in our stomachs to sample all four burgers.  It’s not every night that I attempt to eat as much as humanly possible.  Sometimes I like to enjoy the flavor!  Everything looked good, except the fillings got a little smushed down by the massive amount of meat used for each burger.  There was only a thin layer of stuffing with the rest just being beef.  Next time I’ll have to go a little heavier on the stuffings and a little lighter on the beef.  Rookie mistake.  Not exactly bush league though.  These things were deeeeelicious.

The Gorgonzola Burger is pretty overpowering.  If you’re not a serious Gorgonzola fan, I would stay away from putting it in your burger.  I thought it was very good, but others who tried it found it to be rather disgusting.

The Cheddar Bacon Burger was delicious, but I’ll probably leave the bacon out of the inside of the burger next time.  It lost its crispiness in the cooking process, but still gave the burger great flavor.  The Cheddar didn’t ooze out the way I would have liked it, probably because I didn’t use enough.

The Pierogi Burger was the shocker of them all.  It was incredible.  The potato flavor went right with the burger and the perogi filling actually oozed out of the burger as you pushed down on it.  I’m for sure making another perogi burger.

I had high hopes for the Pizza Roll Burger and it fell flat.  I only put three inside of the burger and they were completely smushed down by the beef.  The only taste of a pizza roll I got was a little bit in the aftertaste.

Give a little effort on the preperation and you can have yourself a plate of delicious leftovers stuffed brontosaurus burgers at home.

On February 21st, 2009 I attempted the Bomber Breakfast for the first time and failed miserably.  It was an embarrassing moment for me.  The waitresses laughed at me, and the bus boy made me bus my own table.  As I was pulling out of the parking lot, customers began throwing eggs at my car.  I required many hours of intense therapy to get over the pain, and three car washes to clean the eggs off.

After my rehabilitation period, I began training for the moment when I was ready to go back and prove to these people that I am not the “skinny little bitch” that they claimed I was.  That breakfast could fit in my stomach, I just went about it wrong!  I should have eaten the hash browns first!  With this in mind, I decided to go full Rocky 4 style and travel to Russia for some old school training.  This included jumping rope, running through the snow, doing sit-ups in a barn, and other activities that don’t involve performance enhancing drugs or running on a treadmill on a ridiculous incline.

With my mind, body and spirit in the right place I returned to the Bomber to reclaim my self respect.  I ordered my breakfast and the waitress brought it to me with a giant smirk on her face.  Little did she know, I was about to blow her mind.

If you’re not familiar with the bomber breakfast, it is one pound of hash browns, ten strips of bacon, four eggs, and two slices of toast.  Observe:

My plan going in was to smother the hash browns with ketchup and Red Hot so they would go down easier.  The first time I attempted this I ate the bacon first then moved onto the hash browns.  This ended up being a terrible idea.  The real challenge of getting through this breakfast is the hash browns.  The taste gets old real fast and your stomach becomes full if you don’t get them down fast enough.  My plan worked beautifully, and the potatoes were gone from the plate within five minutes.  It was a moral victory me just to get those things down.

After getting through the hash browns, it was all down hill from there.  Bacon and over easy eggs are two of my favorite things in the entire world, so this wasn’t even much of a challenge anymore.  The bacon was a little crispy, but it went down fast.  No problems here.  I did see the waitress walk by a few times with a worried look on here face.  Boom.

With the bacon and hash browns gone, victory was in sight.  All I had to do was smash through four eggs and a couple pieces of toast.  I considered this more of a victory lap than a final stretch.  I broke the yolks with my first two pieces of toast and used the dip method, ate the whites with my fork, then cleaned the plate with my final two pieces of toast.  Victory was mine.

If you will notice, I decided to devour that stupid orange garnish just to prove a point.  After finishing, I threw my plate across the restaurant and walked out without paying my bill.  Who’s laughing now?

I would like to point out that everything written above is false.  No one made any ill comments towards me, threw eggs at my car, or made any faces at me.  I also did not travel to Russia.  I did, however, destroy the Bomber Breakfast and the orange that came with it.  Boo yah, bitches.

Every Christmas at the Moors household, we drink, converse, and eat.  Let me place an emphasis on the eating part, because we actually do a lot more than just eat.  We do some serious feasting.  We don’t mess around.  This is the only time when the family comes together every year, and we tend to celebrate it with excess amounts of champagne, wine, and food.  Classic family recipes are made, and if anyone leaves the table feeling anything but full.. Well.. They must have developed some sort of crazy eating disorder over the past twelve months since we last saw each other.  This was the second year I took an active role in the prep for our special Christmas dinner, and my father actually allowed me to document the process.  I will start with our appetizers, and the main course will come tomorrow.  I wanted to combine the two into one big post, but the studio was concerned that the audience would find it too long,  so this will be the “Kill Bill” of blog posts.

This wasn’t planned, but at the last minute I decided that a party just isn’t a party without deviled eggs.  These things are like the twice baked potatoes of the egg family(Egg family?  Seriously, John?).  I like mine to start to start with a little creamy mayo flavor, and progress to a Dijon mustard aftertaste with a little bite.  I always like to throw in a little Tabasco as well.  Am I the first person to mention taste profiles and progressions when describing deviled eggs?  If so, I’m perfectly fine with that.  These things are delicious.

I’m just going to throw this out there real quick, because I know very little about wine and champagne, but I do know that we drink reeeeal good every Christmas.  These two were among the nine bottles of champagne we tried.

The highlight of every Christmas is my Nana’s clam dip.  She brought this recipe back from Japan with her, where my Grandpa was stationed in World War II, and it has been been a family tradition ever since.  It’s a cream cheese based dip with heavy garlic and clam, but I just can’t bring myself to post the recipe.  Gotta keep this one in the family. I will say that this is the most incredible dip I have ever had, and if you love garlic this is heaven in a bowl.

Moving on, bacon wrapped sirloin and scallops.  All I have to say about this is bacon wrapped sirloin and scallops.

We ate the biggest log of goat cheese that I have ever seen in my life.  Seriously, have you ever seen this much goat cheese?  This lasted for about 5 minutes.

And for the final course, Costco chicken pot pie.  Nothing too glamorous about this, unless you’ve had Costco chicken pot pie before.  It would be hard for me to point you to a better pot pie than this one.  Homemade is as close as you’ll get, and it’s still difficult to get this good.

Tomorrow I will bring to you our actual Christmas dinner which will be an Epic Portions classic.  Trust me on that one.

Although a few months with this little device might cause some pretty awesome increases in blood pressure and cholesterol, it is still quite tempting.

WHAT: An alarm clock that wakes you up with the smell and sizzle of cooking bacon.

WHY: No one likes to wake up, especially by an alarm. This clock gently wakes you up with the mouthwatering aroma of bacon, just like waking up on a Sunday morning to the smell of Mom cooking breakfast. Unless you’re Jewish.

http://www.mathlete.com/portfolio/wakeNbacon.php

Delicious!