It seems like every week when we visit Trader Joe’s for a family grocery shopping experience, there are new products that catch my attention and somehow become pulled by gravity into the shopping cart. This can be good and bad–good because more often than not, it’s something delicious and unique or both. Bad because it’s typically something we want to eat and not stop eating.

Such is the case with Trader Joe’s Black Forest Bacon. You know what’s crazy though? There is almost no information on this stuff online. It’s like they are sort of trying to keep it top-secret. Which is fine, because that means more for me and for my wife. But mostly for me (shhhhh). I did find this contest on Food & Wine and while there are some TJ’s bacons on here, I don’t have to try anything on this list to know that the Black Label will whip their bacon asses all up and down that page.

Why is it so good? Well, it crisps up beautifully, meaning it’s tender and the fat becomes something of a liquid pork rind (which is, well, what it is), and the bacon slice itself is bursting with flavor and crispness. It also has no fake taste whatsoever, as it’s real smoked and uncured and has a nice dry rub, but it’s even more remarkable that even if you slightly burn it (which you almost have to to get it crisp), it doesn’t even taste burnt. I don’t know how they do it, but they do, and they do so in my house almost every day lately. We now buy two packs at a time, and might ramp up to three this weekend. I mean, you never know when you will have a bacon emergency, right?

Sometimes you just gotta eat a pile of bacon. I didn’t know what I wanted for breakfast this morning, and pulled out some bacon. I took four thick slices out and cut them in half, and put them on the bacon tray. So that meant 8 short slices of delicious bacon. Now what? I spotted some hot dog rolls, and then it came to me–a little sub of sorts…..a torpedo. Of course, sometimes you have to accent the bacon with a scrambled egg, and you have to then accent that with cheese. So I stacked the bacon on the bun, put the egg on top and the cheese on top of that, and closed it up.

Bam–the bacon and egg torpedo. If I would have thought about it, and if I wasn’t so hungry that I didn’t have time to look for them, I would have thinly sliced up some jalapeno too for some good, clean heat. But hey, it was still pretty good.

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).