No Bacon For You

No Bacon For You

Say What?

This just in.. There will be a bacon shortage next year! What? Stop the presses. We cannot deny the American public to their  first amendment rights to bear bacon with their eggs. A collective groan was heard from sea to shining sea as the latest news hit the smokehouses and diners across our great Motherland. Apparently drought and lack of feed has led to the decrease in hogs available for slaughter. I asked my esteemed colleagues why only bacon? How about sausage and pork loin?

 On a busy week our restaurant cooks up to three cases of bacon. Each case contains 15 pounds or 300 slices of this crispy, salty , porky and don't forget fatty condiment. You will find it is featured at Rainbow Gardens on over six standard menu items and countless additional specials. If you want to sell it add bacon. Chop bacon on a salad, slip it on a club with three slices of perfectly toasted bread spread with blue cheese mayonnaise and you have a hit. Angels on Horseback is the name of a British appetizer that consists of bacon wrapped around oysters. This odd delicacy combination was made famous and given it's official name in our country in the 1960s when a DC socialite served it at many parties during the Kennedy regime. Although we have not ventured there with that food combination, our chefs have endeavored to wrap, Filet of Beef, Chicken Breast, Scallops, Shrimp, and tantalizingly hot Jalapeno Peppers stuffed with cheddar cheese. If you wrap it, they will come.

 Hoarders Are Us

 So now we are all counting our chest freezers wondering how many cases of bacon we can stock pile for this predicted shortage just a mere 365 days away. My Ziploc bags full of crock pot dinners may have to move over and make room. It may even be more cost effective to purchase a new walk in freezer dedicated just to bacon. Years back when the news was all aflutter over the avian flu, they were instructing us to make a stock pile of food and water in our basements for the doomsday when we would not be able to leave our homes for fear of contracting the deadly bird disease. I found this to be absurd reasoning that we would simply move into the restaurant and live off the stores of food in our basement and walk ins. That brilliant idea was put aside when a regular customer  pointed out to me that the entire town would be smashing the front picture windows to confiscate our hoarded supplies.

You Never Know

  As I rewound my memory clock regarding threatened food supplies I recalled that as a teenager I had a poster on my bedroom wall with a guy reading the headlines " Beef Shortage Critical" His dog had his muzzle resting on the kitchen table, while the man spooned a can of Alpo over his spaghetti. I just spent an hour trying to find a picture of this poster to no avail which is a check mark on my hoarding is a good thing side of the page. You never know when you are going to need that awkwardly sick poster that hung in your teenage bedroom next to the hand written lyrics to Meatloaf's  Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad. A funny side note here is that our Meatloaf dish on the menu is topped with bacon. And stockpiling food is just an extension of hoarding.

I was Just Thinking

  Here are some menu ideas inspired by a flurry of slightly sarcastic texts between a few of us kitchen folk. You have to bear in mind that to enter into the culinary world as a professional chef requires a undaunting sense of humor to keep your sanity while toiling away endless hours of stressful time deadlines. A quirky personality is a prerequisite for a career in food service. When your sense of humor is gone it is time to pack your knives and leave the kitchen.

• Panko Crusted Bread Sticks and Toast

• Smoked Panko crumbs to make our own Facon

• Panko crusted Ham Balls wrapped with Bacon

• Bacon Wrapped Prosciutto Ham Balls with Bacon Bit Dip. We are going to call this one The Heart Attack

• Apparently you can make your own bacon wrapped Christmas ornaments as well.

• I am planning on wrapping myself in bacon for Halloween

• If we could just figure out how to make a Panko costume 

 Panko is a light crisp Japanese bread crumb used for  coating foods for deep frying. The word is a combination of the Portuguese word pao for bread and the Japanese ko meaning flour or crumb. The loaves are cooked with electric current, so no dark crust forms and the result is a dry crumbly white crumb. This breading absorbs less fry oil so the final product is crispier and less greasy.

 Don't be sad cause two out of three ain't bad

Standard Breading Station

If you are not going to wrap it in bacon then bread it. No one can resist the delightfully crisp standard breading procedure. Flour, egg, bread crumb and fry! The idea of setting up a standard breading station for any menu item makes this obsessive compulsive neat freak run for the exit. Dipping raw food into pans of each item and coating your fingers in thick raw egg, flour and bread crumb makes this culinary sanitation grad raised by a surgeon father cringe times three. The microbial cross contamination factor must be what makes breaded fried food taste soooo good. You can bread just about anything. If you form it in a cutlet or a ball then you have a breaded home run.

  As we enter into October the garden gives off unripened green tomatoes which beg to be breaded and fried. On a whim we paired them with what else? BACON and created a Fried Green Tomato, Smoke House Turkey Club that is an absolute home run on our specials menu whenever we feature it. After  you have mastered the Bacon ornament, you can move onto the bacon basket weave. This handy dandy little creation tops a club sandwich like a crown and showcases this vanishing commodity like a queen. The bacon potholder will most definitely be featured in some alternate applications. The possibilities are endless... A bacon lattice crust begs for a filling of something Panko crusted. By October 2013 if the price of bacon surpasses that of tenderloin and scallops then chefs will be forced to find more creative ways to display bacon in order to command higher prices to cover those costs. If this said chef begins fashioning stellated octohedrons from pork belly than it may be time to pack it in.

Stellated Octoherdon

"Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad"

Meat Loaf's Lyrics

Baby we can talk all night But that ain't getting us nowhere I told you everything I possibly can There's nothing left inside of here

And maybe you can cry all night But that'll never change the way I feel

The snow is really piling up outside I wish you wouldn't make me leave here I poured it on and I poured it out  I tried to show you just how much I care I'm tired of words and I'm too hoarse to shout  But you've been cold to me so long I'm crying icicles instead of tears  And all I can do is keep on telling you  I want you I need you But there ain't no way I'm ever gonna love you Now don't be sad 'Cause two out of three ain't bad Now don't be sad 'Cause two out of three ain't bad You'll never find your gold on a sandy beach You'll never drill for oil on a city street I know you're looking for a ruby In a mountain of rocks But there ain't no  Coupe de Ville hiding At the bottom of a Cracker Jack box I can't lie I can't tell you that I'm  something I'm not No matter how I try I'll never be able to give you something Something that I just haven't got  There's only one girl that I will ever love And that was so many years ago And though I know I'll never get her out of my heart She never loved me back, ooh I know I remember how she left me on a stormy night  She kissed me and got out of our bed And though I  pleaded and I begged her  Not to walk out that door She packed her bags and turned right away And she kept on telling me She kept on telling me She kep on telling me I want you  I need you But there ain't no way  I'm ever gonna love you  Now don't be sad 'Cause two out of three ain't bad
  Don't be sad 'Cause two out of three ain't bad
 Baby we can talk all night But that ain't getting us nowhere.

I know you all sang those corny lyrics just now and back in the day. And I can go on all night about bacon, but without the corn, there ain't gonna be no bacon in the bottom of our Cracker Jack box. We will have pork loin and sausage, so two outta three ain't bad.

Bacon Rules Bee El