Oven baked bacon

My delicious dinner

Oven temp

I was surprised at the idea of cooking bacon in the oven. Who ever heard of such a thing? But I read that it supposedly preserves the flavor, so I decided to give it a try.

The verdict? Not as much fun as cooking on the stove top, and I don't know that I like it better myself. But it tastes excellent, and my mom kept saying that I'd outdone myself. So I think I'll call it a success. Here's how I did it.

Ingredients

Bacon
Elephant garlic (real garlic would also work)
Mushrooms
Cayenne powder

The ingredients, minus cayenne -- it's lonely that it was forgotten :(

Instructions

Preheat oven to 365°f. Or as close as you can guess. (Really, how many ovens will show you exactly where that is?)

Rinse your bacon in cold (or cool) water and lay it in a pan.

Note: I'm not sure how important this actually is, but I also read that this is supposed to reduce how much bacon will shrink as it cooks. In any case, I was impressed at how little the bacon shrunk, but this is also the first time I'd cooked it in the oven. So, I'll reserve judgment on my opinion of rinsing in cold/cool water until further experimentation.

Next dice your garlic and cut up your mushrooms. I intentionally left the garlic in small chunks rather than chopping it finer because I remembered the joy of biting into garlic chunks at a favorite restaurant.

Sharp pointy things...

Scrape the garlic and mushrooms onto the bacon, and rearrange things so that they're underneath. The idea is for the bacon juices to seep into them.

Sprinkle cayenne powder on top.

Ready to cook

Close up

Cook for 10 minutes, enjoying how amazing it smells.

The finished thing

Close up

Doesn't it look amazing? And to my surprise, there wasn't a lot of grease lying in the pan.

I had the bacon with a baked potato. Hey, people put bacon bits on potatoes, so why not serve bacon on the side? And, it was a delicious dinner.

Delicious dinner

Imbolc

Today is Imbolc, or Brighid's day. I haven't done much, other than experimenting with new ways to cook bacon and cuddling my boyfriend. No, not at the same time. Not sure how well cuddling and cooking would work if you tried them both at once...

I do want to share a song, though. It's the same one I shared last Imbolc, but it's worth repeating.



And now that Imbolc is here, it looks like the local weather is going to get colder. So much for the winter weather being past, as I'd thought it was. I'm just going to say that if it snows, I want an actual snowfall, not just the little bit that normally happens when people panic over snow in Portland.

Of "fish diets" and cholesterol

A doctor decided to check my cholesterol more than a year ago. I guess that's a strange thing to check in someone my age, but at the time I was really sick with some virus so they were doing various tests on me.

The results came back strange enough for the doctor I had at the time to actually allow me to see her shock. The HDL -- the good cholesterol -- was really low. I wasn't too upset when she told me to cut back on red meat, but I was very unamused when she told me to start eating fish regularly. Still, I did what she said.

So I've spent over the last year on what I have called the "fish diet." I've only eaten red meat once a week (in theory) and I've been having fish several times a week. Fortunately I've discovered that I can enjoy fish and seafood after all, if it's prepared well.

Yesterday I had my first visit with a new doctor. (My old one moved out of state, then I didn't like my first choice for a replacement doc, but this one I do like. I think I'll keep her.) When I asked about rechecking my cholesterol her first response was to ask why they'd checked it for someone who's twenty-four years old. I refrained from mentioning that I was twenty-three at the time, and instead watched her reaction to what she saw for my old test results. It was something along the lines of, "Wait, it's 8? When we talk about it being low it's normally in the 30's. I've never seen it like this before. I've never seen that before."

Gotta love it when the doctors let you see them like that.

The doctor told me to stop by the lab on the way out so they could check where my cholesterol is at now, and also that she would send me to a specialist if it hasn't changed.

Well, I've got my results back, and even though no one's called to translate them for me, the numbers look ok.

I think I'll keep eating fish though. Partially because I don't want things to get back to where they were before. But also because I've found that I really do like fish. In fact, I sort of want to celebrate at my favorite seafood restaurant. :)

Boiled Shrimp by yamada taro