My apartment is a large single-level dwelling. The kitchen is divided into a sink/range and a prep area, bisected by the egress and ingress to the pantry and from the living room, respectively. When I prepare bacon I use the George Foreman grill and repeated batches can generate a good bit of smoke. If I don’t close the door to the pantry the smoke alarm aka bacon siren will be activated regardless of how much ventilation I have in the kitchen. So I close the door, open the windows, and turn on the range exhaust fan for good measure. I set an alarm on my watch to go off after four or five minutes whereby I rotate the bacon or put a new raster on the grill. Normally I prepare about a lb of bacon in two or three batches but today I was going through a full three pounds in an effort to increase the amount of on-hand bacon in my kitchen. After about the fifth or sixth batch I glanced into the kitchen and saw a thick haze near the ceiling that would have made the fire alarm shit itself. This cloud was about two feet thick and made a nice band going from the grill to the exhaust. It flowed continuously and had periodic breaks when I rotated batches and for a moment there was no bacon to sizzle, punctuating its continuous stream. My mouth watered looking at realizing it was a cloud of bacon. If I could have bottled it I would to infuse other dishes but sadly, I don’t yet have this technology. My kitchen now had food-based weather and today a new phenomenon was witnessed, bacon haze.

To all those who’ve had bacon prepared by me prior to today: I’m sorry.  I sometimes prepare bacon by baking it at 400°F but as I began preparing breakfasts that otherwise required baking I had to move away from that.  I moved to pan frying I kept the surface at 375° and chronically overcooked it.  Today I prepared 3 lbs of it at 325° with no noticable problems.  I promise to do so from now on, and not insult you with burnt bacon.

A while back, I thought about making bacon chip cookies, and tonight I did.  They were quite nice, and I think I’d prepare them when I have curious company or need to fulfill a stereotype.  The more interesting part was acquiring the bacon at the Genuardi’s Checkout Line.

Me: Please don’t waste a bag to wrap the bacon separately.
Cashier: You don’t want the bacon touching the other food, do you?
Me: Why not?
Cashier: It’s bacon, it has juices.
Me: So you’re telling me that your store sells leaky bacon?
Cashier: No, but some of the bacon might go through the packaging.
Me: Please, don’t wrap it.
Cashier: Ok, but make sure you cook it just in case something gets in.

I’m confident that the shrink wrapped packaging inspected by the FDA for a meat that’s probably irradiated that I’m going to prepare over a 350° griddle and then crumble up and put into a cookie to be baked at 375° should be sufficiently safe.  Should the bacon magically exit the packaging through an aggregate quantum super-position tunneling effect in a process that would normally require millions of times the age of the universe to happen, I’d gladly suffer any intestinal disease to have witnessed a macroscopic manifestation of such quantum wierdness.

If the baconness were to spread, it’s more likely to be stopped by the glass containers of the other ingredients that shared a back with it than by the seran wrap-like condom of a wasted grocery bag.  Besides, what what if bacon-ness spread?  I don’t see how that’s a bad thing.  If bacon held its consistency better I’d use it as a coffee stirrer and in its thicker form a kind of edible fork for things that are scooped like rice or oatmeal.