I had good intentions with another bacon recipe to post this past weekend, but lo and behold, not every recipe I develop is any good. My plan was to take refrigerated crescent rolls, and fill them with bacon and sausage and cheese. Mmmmm, breakfast-y goodness, right? Well, not really, and this makes me wonder how many recipes out there that are really good actually fail sometimes and fail as miserably as my breakfast sandwich.

I cooked a bunch of bacon, and our 4-year old son ate more of it than I needed. That’s my boy. I was left with two slices. I cooked a link of turkey breakfast sausage. Then I took the rolls out or should I say, Mrs. Mike and I (mostly her) had to fight to open the package, which should have been our first sign. I won’t say the brand, because I don’t want to throw anyone under the bus here, but I will say this–the crescent rolls I bought were butter flavored. Now, you’d think that anything’s better with butter, right? The catch here is I don’t think it’s real butter we’re talking about.

Anyway, I assembled the roll by pinching two triangles together to make a rectangle, and then I laid down some cheese, bacon and the sausage link and rolled that sucker up. I baked it for a few minutes longer than what the recipe suggested, and took a bite. B-L-E-C-H. I took another bite. B-L-E-C-H. It was the butter flavored roll, not anything else that made it disgusting. I imagine that with normal crescent rolls or biscuits, this sandwich would taste really good. But I haven’t recovered from that vile butter taste to give it a go.

I will say this, though…..it’s been fun writing about bacon and coming up with recipes, so why not extend bacon week for another little while? I’ll be preoccupied for a few days but will deliver more bacon posts next week and into the following week before turning our attention to Halloween candy. Sound good? I thought so.

One of the best things about bacon is the BLT–bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich. I’m not quite sure why it all goes together, but it does. You can come up with all kinds of variations, but to me, the simplest form of BLT is the best–bacon, iceberg lettuce, ripe tomato, and mayo on white bread or a white roll. Today I bought some white sandwich rolls and ate two of them, pictured above.

Here is how to do it. First, cook some bacon (yesterday we went over a few ways to do this). I chose to make two kinds–Oscar Mayer center cut bacon and a maple bacon I found today. I mixed the two on my sandwich and they came out amazing. After cooking the bacon (2-4 slices per sandwich), spread some mayo on the bread. Layer cooked bacon, tomato and lettuce, and that’s it! You can add a bit of salt and pepper if you like, or use rye or wheat bread, or even use a wrap, but the basic flavors are key.

Okay, on to come up with more bacon ideas!

We’ll have plenty of bacon talk this week, but I wanted to just offer a few items today to kick things off.

First of all, I have to have blood drawn tomorrow morning for my semi-annual cholesterol check. I’ve come to learn that it’s not so much bacon and eggs that muddy your blood, or at least my blood. But rather, it’s carbs. So I like to eat lots of bacon and other meats when I’m watching my weight and/or carbs. But that doesn’t mean I at a pound of the stuff today before my blood test. But I will indeed eat much bacon this week as I sample and create some more recipes. Our 4 year old son also loves bacon, and often pulls the package out of the deli drawer in the fridge and hands it to me or Mrs. Mikey. Pretty funny.

Anyway, the other thing I wanted to mention was how to best cook bacon. The traditional way is in a frying pan, but this can get extremely messy and not result in the best product. You can also bake it in an oven on a wire rack set over a baking sheet, and it comes out perfectly crispy this way, but also takes a while.

The best way is to use a microwave. And I don’t mean cooking that “pre-cooked” bacon that you nuke in like 15 seconds. That stuff isn’t the same. I’m talking nuking real slices of bacon with either a bacon tray or a plate with paper towels. I’ve broken many a tray, so I am currently using the plate and towel method. You put about 2 sheets of paper towel down on the plate, lay a few slices of bacon down, and top with 1-2 more sheets of paper towel. You nuke on high for two minutes, turn the paper towels over and change them, and then nuke for another 1-2 minutes. Your bacon, unless it’s super thick, will be just about perfect. And you may never look at cooking bacon as a chore again!

I think I’ve been talking about this for as long as I’ve been writing about food–having a Bacon Week. I think it is time, and I think the time is next week. It will be all bacon, all the time, and we’ll have recipes, ideas, man-love or other random thoughts revolving around our favorite part of the pig.

Last month some of Mrs. Mikey’s relatives came to visit, and being Jewish, her uncle told me that he’d never had bacon in his life. I realize that a large portion of the population has not because of religious beliefs, being vegetarian, or because their doctors won’t allow them to eat something with that sort of fat content. But I felt very sad for him at that very time, and I think that those of us who have come to love and appreciate the taste of bacon would feel the same way.

Heck, even Mikey Junior (not his real name) loves bacon, and he’s four years old. True story, I asked him today what he wanted for lunch. He walks to the fridge, opens the meat drawer and hands me the package of bacon. That’s my boy. Anyway, stay with us and buckle in your bacon belts! (yeah, I just said that).