Tonight I was out walking with a friend who recently moved from the neighborhood. He called me while he was on the way home to see if I wanted to walk. We had a nice long walk and conversation. He told me about a wild pig problem in his new neighborhood. This made my mind wander to bacon so I am rewriting a previous post about bacon.
Instead of frying bacon, I now bake it in the oven. There is a lot less mess to clean up.
Just the smell of uncooked bacon will often get my mind wandering. Many people do not know that I worked in a small butcher shop (Ye Olde Meat Shoppe) during my first term of college. In that job I learned a lot about different cuts of meat and also their smells.
A lot of memories of this job, which didn’t last but a couple months, will often come wandering back. My next job after that was in a grocery store, but not in the meat department. Instead I worked as a bag boy and checker before starting to work in the pharmacy. I ended selling drugs to put myself through college.
The smell of uncooked bacon also brings back memories of working in packing plants across the country. I worked for a packaging and labeling company out of Kansas City for a couple years and spent lots of times working around meat in different stages of production. You could always tell when you were near the bacon processing areas of a plant because of the distinctive smell.
My mind also wanders to my travels to England and Australia and having English style bacon for breakfast. I actually like this bacon better.
I also think of my many breakfasts around the world and how the bacon is cooked in different places. Eating bacon for breakfast is one of the little pleasures I indulge in when away from home.
I am not a morning person, so unless someone else is cooking my breakfast for me I usually don’t have anything that takes a lot of preparation.
Bacon for breakfast is one thing I miss when I go to Israel. However, that doesn’t mean that I haven’t had bacon in Israel. Jacob’s Pizza in Jerusalem has a great bacon pizza.
I am also thinking of bacon wrapped little smokies. This is something that I usually have on New Year’s Eve. Some of my good friends usually bring them to parties then. They even brought me some all the way from Patterson on New Year’s Eve 2021 during the pandemic. It was good to see them for a few minutes, even though we stayed distanced from each other and wore our masks.
Bacon…….
Maybe my next shopping trip needs to include some bacon. It has been a while since I have baked some.
Steven
Braman's Wanderings 