FoodNerd!

Just a couple of notes to self:
– A while ago, i made some oden using the dried flavor packet you can buy at the Japanese markets. It was pretty meh. Today, i had some daikon to cook up, so i used another of the packets in a medium pot of water, but i amped it up with maybe 1/4 cup shoyu, a big splash of sake & a bigger splash of mirin. MUCH better.
– Tonight we made the Ma Po Tofu recipe from the Pei Mei cookbook volume 1. I didn’t bother deepfrying the tofu first, nor did i have the required pork — all i had was some fresh shiitake. So i just put a bunch of peanut oil into the big skillet, added the garlic & shiitake, fried them a while, then added some more peanut oil (a bit too much really) and the tofu. Then i added the spicy bean paste and soy sauce and let it all fry up for a while. Last went in the chicken broth, which i then set to boiling down. I ground the black pepper on top of the tofu and let it sit there to add flavor. The cornstarch slurry went in just at the end, when the broth was reduced but still entirely liquid. This came out VERY nice indeed, spicy and rich and with a bracing hit of fresh black pepper. The shiitake add a sweet flavor that is entirely lovely, and i would recommend this substitution for any vegetenarians wanting to make a Ma Po Tofu. I like the flavor of this at least as much as any restaurant version, and it goes together in a flash, presuming of course you have spicy bean paste in the house. Which you all should — it’s yummy and has a multitude of uses.
1 package tofu, cut in large cubes
sm package fresh shiitake, cut chunky
4 sm cloves garlic, cut rough
several tbsp peanut oil
2 tbsp spicy bean paste
2-3 tsp soy sauce
sprinkle of salt
1 cup chicken broth
lots of fresh ground black pepper
2 tsp cornstarch + 2 tsp water = slurry
chopped green onion (i didn’t have any)
also it specified to drizzle sesame oil on each serving, but since i overdid it a little on the peanut oil, i skipped it. And yes, we ate it up without taking photos. sorry, y’all.
one other note: though it’s not super spicy and has no szechuan peppercorns, and therefore perhaps is not strictly speaking an authentic szechuan recipe, the recipe from Pei Mei is very tasty. I may try goosing it a little szechuan-style next time, to see what happens.

The delights at Bacon Club run the gamut from subtle scones to insane desserts to the bacon-wrapped classics. Everything was good, some things were great. We are full. Note to self: Miller High Life is the perfect beer for Bacon Club.
The photographic evidence:
hunter bacon (raw smoked/cured bacon from the russian shop, very chewy & salty and lovely on a vimta cracker), and choco maple bacon bites
did i mention, choco maple bacon bites? holy crap. yum. crispy bacon, with maple cream made with maple syrup and bacon fat cooked & whipped, and topped with a roasted cocoa bean from the Dominican Republic.
crustless fluffernutters with bacon. Elvis-rific.
Korean braised pork belly (braised plain with garlic) with salty sesame sauce & scallions
brussels sprouts with bacon & hot pepper flakes
my bacon cups with mac & cheese on the left, arancini with asparagus & bacon on the right. The bacon cups with mac-cheese did in fact work well — they were tasty and popular, and even the shaggy and tiny ones held their filling well. We filled them before we left home, then ran them through the oven to heat through and crisp the last flabby bits of bacon.
arancini (mmmmmmmm)
tomato-bacon soup (also nice as a sauce for arancini)
bacon-pepper-cheese scones
bananas foster with bacon & pecans
bacon flavored toothpicks
lentils with carrots, celery, onions with slab bacon
artichokes & mushrooms with pancetta & lemon
artichokes with mustard, wrapped in bacon and broiled — this is a really tasty thing, and probably quite easy… i may steal it for my next party
borscht with bacon… i didn’t actually try this last one, as its maker arrived with it long after I had already stuffed staggering amounts of bacon down my gullet
Also, special bonus recipe from our lovely Bacon Club hostess: for bacon caramel popcorn, cook equal parts B-grade maple syrup and bacon fat to the hard crack stage, mix with popcorn, crisped bacon pieces and pecans. She said that 2 cups each syrup & bacon fat was enough for 10 cups popcorn. Let me know if you try it before i do.

We have some friends who came over for Chow & Chow, and we got to talking about other forms of gastronomic excess… which led us to discuss their ongoing potluck series, Bacon Club. You see where this is going, don’t you? Heh.
Bacon Club involves a number of pork-fat-loving folk gathering together, each with their own bacon dish, and consuming all those bacony treats and compatible alcohols in one evening of porcine delight. Obviously we were not going to miss this.

It’s tonight, and we are making bacon cups filled with macaroni and cheese. We’d recently seen the bacon cups on Not Martha and been exceedingly impressed, so of course they sprang immediately to mind. Those had been filled with lettuce and tomato, for a breadless BLT, but tomatoes are appallingly out of season at the moment, so we cast about for a more suitable filling. Mac & cheese seemed suitably excessive and decadent.
I never like most homemade mac & cheese, because it’s insufficiently cheesy. So i surfed around, and my conclusion is that the inadequate cheese flavor is due to two things: use of mild rather than strong cheeses, and use of bechamel. The flour dulls the taste of cheese. Interestingly, a 19th century recipe involved only laying slices of cheese in layers with macaroni and baking till melted.
stove-top mac & cheese, smooth and cheesy like it should be
I found a few recipes without any flour, and it’s easy enough to swap in whatever cheeses you like… so i settled on Alton Brown’s stovetop recipe, with a bit heavier hand with the hot sauce and mustard powder and cheese (12oz instead of 10), and a bit of sauteed onion just for grins. This came out rather good, though tallasiandude thought it too sharply cheesy (sigh). Anyway, i think that i will stick with this as a basic template, and perhaps next time i will add a bit of prepared mustard to give it a little acid zing to balance the cheesy richness. Or swap in a little chevre for some of the cheddar, mmmm. Or perhaps even a little Velveeta, for that low-rent orange meltiness — i used to make my grilled cheese sandwiches with one Kraft single and one slice of sharp cheddar, to get the best of both worlds. Those were frickin’ awesome.
But back to bacon… the first few woven bacon cups came out perfect, though they took about 40 minutes to fully cook, but the last few batches have shrunk too much too fast and been done in about 20 mins. Part of it is that the different packs of bacon have slices of different widths, and it’s harder to get it right with thinner slices, but the other part must be that the oven is now too hot. So we have a number of raggedy-ass bacon cup-slash-scraps, and a few that are tiny little thimbles, but perhaps once they are topped with creamy mac-and-cheese, no one will notice.
first cups
tiny cups, falling off the forms
ragged cups
Hmm, I’ve just now done another batch and they seem fine, and i think i’ve figured out the problem: one of my muffin tins is modern and flimsy, and another is vintage and heavy… and the problem was with the heavy old tin. As I was pouring off the fat from a pan that’s been sitting out of the oven for 15 minutes — the cookie sheet base was cool enough to lift up and pour from — I noticed that the muffin tin itself was still hot enough to be uncomfortable to hold. If the inner support is hot enough to cook the bacon from inside at the same time as the oven cooks from the outside, that might be what’s shrinking them up and popping them off the tins.
       
I’ll post again once we’re back from Bacon Club, with the final verdict and photos. Either way, it’s awfully fun to spend a morning doing arts and crafts with raw bacon and then filling the house with the smell of crisped bacon. Yay.
BTW: we used 4 12oz packs of regular thin-cut bacon for this, which filled two large trays (maybe 25 cups). I made a whole pound of pasta rather than Alton’s 8oz, and it seemed cheesy enough, but perhaps it would be saucier with less pasta. In any case, a drier, clingier mac-n-cheese was just the ticket for this application, as it stayed in the cups properly and didn’t ooze liquid cheese through the holes in many of the cups when re-heated. Not that you need even close to that much mac-n-cheese; we’ve got 2/3 of the pot left for dinner tomorrow.
(PS: I don’t seem to have any posts about Chow & Chow, and neither does tallasiandude — we must have been too busy. This was a rather fun party in which we made a boatload of dumplings and other chinese dishes, ate them, and then stayed up far too late watching Stephen Chow movies. Recommended.)