Most Hilarious Christmas Gift

Tags

bacon jam, Christmas, cooking, humor

I received some lovely gifts this year for Christmas, but by far the most entertaining was a small jar of bacon jam.

Yes, bacon jam.

This is real

This spreadable bacon may seem strange to you, but when added to scrambled eggs or spread on a toasted sandwich, it actually tastes pretty good. You have the bacon taste without the difficulty of the bacon falling out of the side of the sandwich. It is a little strange, and it is actually sweeter and less salty than I thought it would be (brown sugar is an ingredient), but it’s really not too bad. I wouldn’t eat it straight from the jar, but when added to something else (I hear it’s great on hamburgers), it adds a nice bacon flavor.

Let me know if you want to sample it, and I’ll see if I can whip up something that includes this ingredient.

Mostly I think what I enjoy about this bacon spread is thinking “I am eating bacon jam” to myself every time I take a bite. It’s funny every time.

Cooking Adventures, Again

Tags

accident, coffee, cooking, instant oatmeal

Be careful what you put in your microwave. Microwaves are not built to handle very much, though they do a decent job at warming things up if used correctly.

Yesterday, however, was a lesson on watching food. I put a mug with instant oatmeal and some water in the microwave for a minute. All was well. I took it out and stirred it, noticing that it was still quite soupy and not cooked. I had added too much water, so I thought I should put the oatmeal in for another minute.

I knew I should be watching the oatmeal as it cooked, and I did watch for the first few seconds, but then I got distracted by something else and looked away for about 25 seconds. That was all the time my oatmeal needed. When I looked back at the microwave, I saw with horror that the oatmeal had exploded all over the microwave!

It had completely overflowed the mug and almost all of it was now covering the turntable of the microwave. The next few minutes were spent cleaning out the microwave and wiping off the outside of the mug, which seemed to have more oatmeal than the inside.

Alas, my breakfast was gone.
And I hadn’t even had coffee yet. Now that I think about it, both my recent cooking snafus have taken place prior to the consumption of coffee. Perhaps I should learn something from this. Actually, in this case, I learned two important things:

1. Watch your microwave oatmeal like a hawk.
2. Drink coffee first (though perhaps this tip should come first…).

Adventures in Baking

Tags

breakfast blunders, cooking, pancakes

Baking powder and baking soda are not the same thing. Neither can they always be substituted for each other.

I discovered these important cooking facts this morning when I tried to make pancakes for breakfast. I zipped through the recipe, adding ingredients to my glass bowl and stirring them together. 2 cups of milk, 2 eggs, 2 cups of flour, baking something-or-other, salt, vanilla extract, etc.

The batter seemed a little more soupy than usual, so I added a little flour to compensate, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. That is, until I took a few bites of my pancakes.

At first everything seemed normal. The pancakes tasted pancake-y, but I noticed a strange almost metallic aftertaste. I tried to ignore it and kept shoveling down bites of syrupy goodness, but eventually it became impossible to ignore: my pancakes tasted slightly like tinfoil. I sipped my coffee to wash down the flavor, and tried to figure out what happened to make the pancakes such a disaster, and finally realized something important:

I had added 2 tablespoons of baking soda to the recipe, instead of baking powder.

Mmmmm. No wonder my breakfast had that slight Arm & Hammer Toothpaste flavor. Clearly, baking powder and baking soda should not be substituted for one another. As I sadly threw out the rest of my batter, unwilling to subject anyone else to this particular batch of pancakes, I thought that perhaps it is best to begin cooking after having a few sips of morning coffee, not before. And perhaps double checking the recipe before blithely throwing in ingredients would help too. Or at least thinking about the crucial differences between powder and soda.