Bacon

I never thought of smoking potatoes before making these skins but from now on I won\’t make them any other way.

Clamato, Pickled Green Beans, and Bacon Salt, for delicious bloody Caesars.

Freshly made thick cut french fries are smothered in a thick New England clam chowder. It\’s a poutine chowder mash-up!

A BLT flavored ice cream with bacon and arugula in the actual ice cream and a sweet tomato jam as the topping.  Inspired by Orange is the New Black.

A delicious egg dish inspired by everyone\’s favorite breakfast cocktail

There is always something great about making that first dish in your new kitchen. Learning the new space, finding out things that are great and not so great about it. Realizing things that you forgot to move or get at the store and making quick changes to the dish based on that. I made these bacon coconut noodles as the first dish at the place I moved into a few days ago and I am absolutely loving it. The kitchen and the noodles.

I wouldn’t exactly say that I was snowed in, but after being out all day in the gross snow/rain mixture, when it was time to finally be home I didn’t want to leave. I decided to try and make a soup based off things I only had in the house. The soup came out amazing and really warming on such a cold night, and I think it was mainly because of a slab of delicious bacon I was able to grab on a recent trip to the Culinary Institute of America with Jones Dairy Farm. The smokey bacon really gave the soup a deep warming flavor. Homemade stock, a can of tomatoes, and noodles from a package of ramen (without the flavor packet) rounded things out. Honestly there was nothing I would have rather eaten that night.

My hobby: making pasta sauces out of vegetables besides tomatoes. I’ve done it with red peppers, carrots, and now corn. Mandi is obsessed with summer corn right now, and for good reason, it just tastes so damn good! I always get happy when I can think of a fun unique corn recipe, because most of the time I just eat it off the cob and don’t get to feature it on the site. This sauce came out really sweet because of the sweet nature of corn and carrots. Overall it was really awesome and balanced with the cheese and bacon, but once in awhile you would get a bite that was a little too sweet.

Finally there’s a date! The much awaited 4th season of Arrested Development will be available on Netflix in full on May 26th. To celebrate, I am dedicating a week of recipes to the greatest food moments of the first 3 seasons. Today is one of my all time favorites, Hot Ham Water. In this episode (s3-e9 “S.O.B’s”), Lindsay is trying to be more of a domesticated mother figure to the family, and her first attempt at cooking dinner is a dish she likes to call Hot Ham Water. I took inspiration from this scene to make a flavorful ham broth and load it up with some sauteed ham, collard greens, and udon noodle. Tasty stuff!

I think this idea came from an old episode of Iron Chef where Bobby Flay cooks some pasta in jalapeno juice. One of my favorite things to cook with jalapeno is bacon, and it seems to be a very popular thing these days. There is even jalapeno crusted bacon in the grocery store! You would think that this dish is all bold intense flavors, but it actually came out more subtle and perfectly balanced. Boiling the pasta in jalapeno juice didn’t give it a crazy spicy taste, but rather imparted the true jalapeno flavor with just a little bit of the heat that it is so well known for. This was a fairly easy dish with unique and delicious flavors that I would highly suggest anyone who has a juicer to make immediately.

There is a traditional breakfast dish in mexico called chilaquiles which basically is soggy breakfast nachos. I decided to make my own version of breakfast nachos, but shred any sense of authenticity and just make them my way. They came out way better than I expected, and I would recommend this dish to anyone, especially next time you happen to be hungover. I could imagine this being served for 15 bucks at your local uptight gastropub brunch.

These beans are baked in a coffee and bacon mixture until tender, creamy, and delicious.