bacon kettle corn

I said it! BACON. KETTLE. CORN. oh yes. yes indeedy. You see, over the weekend I had some fresh kettle corn from some dude in a parking lot. I always forget how great that stuff is! Not as sweet and sticky as caramel corn..it's crisp and has a bit of salt to it and just enough sweet...gosh darn addicting is what it is.

"I need to figure out how to make this glorious snack," says I. So I consulted the handy booklet that was included with my Whirley Pop and sure enough there was a recipe for "sweet glaze popcorn" which sounded right on.

A little later, I was checking out some links I had saved in regards to different and fun ways to use my bacon. Bacon caramels and pork candy are truly inspired recipes, and I will probably try them both someday. The one that really got me thinking, however, was this bacon popcorn. Sounds good as is, but with those sweet bacon recipes on my mind, along with my urge to make kettle corn, the idea to make bacon kettle corn came naturally.


Basically, I cut some thick slices of the bacon into small bites, fried them until they were crispy, and poured the resulting grease into the popcorn popper. Then I added a little veg oil to supplement it (about 6 or 7 tablespoons of oil all-together...drippings and other oil combined), some regular sugar (4 tablespoons), brown sugar (approx. 3 tablespoons) and unpopped popcorn (2/3 cup). I also put the bacon pieces in there, and whirled it until it all popped. Easy!


Wowsers! this was some crispy, salty/sweet goodness!

tiny toasts

I am actually making beef stock today, thanks to my new book. However I think I will just be finishing it right before I head out to my 10 year high school reunion (10 Years! Can you even believe it?). So, I won't get a chance to write all about it until tomorrow (when, hopefully, Jack will be using it for some French Onion soup!)

So here's what I ate while working on my stock today.

I love those little min-toasts. They are my favorite vehicle for brie and other soft cheeses and cheese spreads. They are simple...no powdery overly-herbed flavors. Just tiny toasted crunchy bread. Gorgeous.

I roasted some beef marrow bones along with soup bones for my stock. Once out of the oven, I couldn't help but scrape the tiny bit of marrow out of a couple of the bones to try it. Bone marrow is after all, what Tony Bourdain chose as his last meal for the new book My Last Supper: 50 Great Chefs and Their Final Meals / Portraits, Interviews, and Recipes by Melanie Dunea It's a neat book (and uh-oh! tony is nooood innit!) that's fun to read. Thought-provoking and drool-inducing...luckily they provide recipes AND restaurant names. For a really good preview of the book, check out Time magazine's slideshow. Anyway, although my marrow wasn't veal marrow, it was still a fantastic little nub of rich flavor. Sooo good. All I did was sprinkle some kosher salt on it and put it on a mini toast:



Although rich and delicious, one tiny toast with a little bone marrow does not a lunch make. A friend gave me some leftover cranberry chutney he had made. I don't have the recipe, but it was a spicy chutney. Yum! I pulled some meat off a store-bought smoked turkey leg and had myself a little thanksgiving teaser:




Okay, I gotta go add the veggies and aromatics to my stock and get all prettified to see my old pals.

party stef

This weekend I "catered" a friend's Halloween party. It was quite a bit of work, but not stressful at all. I got to try some recipes I've been hoarding. Here's what I made:

Hummus:

I made 3 kinds; Plain, Roasted red pepper and curry. I didn't use a recipe for any of them, because Hummus is simple and hard to mess up. It's basically canned chickpeas, fresh garlic, lemon juice, olive oil and tahini (sesame seed paste). However, I could not seem to find tahini at my normal stores, so I used sunflower seed butter instead, which was a good substitute I think. For the Roasted red pepper I simply threw in some jarred roasted red peppers. For the curry I added curry powder, ginger, cinnamon, and turmeric. I served them with pita chips and raw veggies. People who were hummus eaters at the party liked them, but these ended up being the least popular of my 5 items. Just not the crowd for it, I guess.

Brie tarts:

These are a simple idea I got from attifood. Basically you put cubes of Brie in pre-made phyllo cups, put some kind of preserves (I used pepper pecan jelly) on it and top it with a walnut. Bakes them for about 10 minutes, and voila! The second most popular item I made.

Meat Lollipops:


These were an idea from Food Wishes. Simply spread goat cheese on a bread stick and wrap it with some delicious meat. I used proscuitto, capicolla ham, and salami. For half of them, I mixed in chopped fresh basil with the goat cheese. These were a pretty big hit. I wish I could have found skinnier breadsticks (which I did a couple days later, darn it). On second thought, the cheese makes the stick a little soft after awhile (don't be grossed out, it's still tasty, and you hardly notice because the rest of the stick is still crunchy), so a skinny breadstick might not have held up well unless people are eating them right away...

Salami and Pistachio mini muffins:

These were adapted from Chocolate & Zucchini's recipe for a Chorizo Pistachio and Sun-dried tomatoes loaf. I simply replaced the hard-to-find chorizo with some smoked salami and cooked the batter in mini-muffin tins instead of a loaf pan. These were Jack's favorite, and he has requested that I make some for Thanksgiving.

Sweet & Sour meatballs:

These were so popular I didn't get a picture of the finished product. That's just a naked meatball, there, fresh out of the oven. It's a very 60's recipe, with a sauce consisting only of chili sauce and grape jelly and lemon juice and garlic powder. The meatballs are a mixture of pork, hamburger, onions, garlic, breadcrumbs and eggs. Here's the recipe I started from, but I added more to my meatball mixture. It's amazing how such a weird sounding and simple recipe can be sooo popular. A few people commented that the flavors brought back memories from when they were kids. Ha!

overall I enjoyed doing this. It was like I was hosting a party myself, only it was at someone else’s house (my apartment could not handle it) and someone else was paying for everything. Awesome!