Too Much Pork for Just One Fork

Some of you may recall my earlier post about my mother in law and her fondness for canned food products. I may have neglected to mention her other enduring passion: mass produced cured meats. I am fairly sure she’s keeping Hillshire Farm in business.

She has a big thing for kielbasa. That stuff has seriously got to be one of the vilest substances on the planet (right up there with Capri Sun). I refuse to eat it and absolutely will not feed it to my kids. I shudder to think of the random animal parts they’ve thrown in there, along with chemicals, soy and way too much salt. Whenever a package comes into the house, I usually suggest that we just get rid of it. Then the ever lovin’ tells me we can’t just waste it and that he’ll take care of it. So it sits in the back of the fridge for months until he winds up cooking it some night (usually well past the expiration date) when I’m out of the house.

I should note that I’m not anti processed meat entirely. I’m totally down with bacon, for example. We don’t eat it every day or anything, but it has a special glorified place in this family--nitrates be damned.

I’ve been fascinated to note the maple bacon doughnut craze that seems to be sweeping the nation (or at least the really cool places). People keep putting posts up on facebook about them. I have yet to sample one of these babies but it really does seem to be quite the phenomenon. Here’s a bacon blogger on Anthony Bourdain’s visit to Voodoo Doughnut in Portland. And this site is insane. They’ve got the chocolate glazed maple bacon doughnut, plus bacon caramel corn and a bacon and chicken narwhal that’s pretty cute. Of course, the doughnuts also have their own entry on Wiki if you want some background. And remember last year when they came out with scientific proof that bacon cures hangovers? An old friend of mine from New Orleans writes a brilliant and widely read blog about his exploits as an English teacher in Russia and more recently the Middle East. His recent post on the politics of pork in the classroom was pretty good. At least there’s no booze available either so I imagine it's a little easier to keep the bacon jones in check...