Category: Food Critic

Meat Madness

As you’ve probably heard, March Madness / the NCAA tournament for college basketball is underway.  It can be fun to fill out your bracket and see how well you predict who wins what games.  But I don’t keep up with it enough to know all the teams, so some of it would be just a blind guess for me.  But there is a similar-style bracket that I would know more about: Meat Madness.

Meat Madness has a tournament-style bracket of 32 contenders.   There are 4 regions: the “Red” Meat Region, the Poultry Region, and Pork Region, and the Seafood Region.  Not every meat fits exactly into those categories, but it’s close enough.  There are no rules on how to vote — you can base your vote on flavor, cost, convenience, whatever.  Personally, I think flavor trumps all other considerations.

Click the image for a larger version.

The Pork Region is stacked!  Bacon is favored (hence its #1 seed), but there’s some good challenges there.  And in a way, it’s unfair to have steak be only one entry, because there are several different tasty varieties.

I didn’t create this (though I find myself wondering why I didn’t think of this first).  Here’s the link to the original meat madness bracket so you can read their description of it, along with the comments to see how it played out.  Ironically, ESPN came out with their own Meat Madness bracket a week after So Good did.  ESPN’s has 64 seeds, but the article debates each one and tells you the winners without reader participation.  Still, if you want to look at it, here’s the link.

I’d like to get a group of guys together to vote on this sometime to see what really does win.  If that happens, I’ll let you know who wins.   In the meantime, you can share your predictions with us in a comment.  Who should win, and why?

Buffet o’ Bacon 4

Last night I had the Buffet o’ Blog staff at my house, and I knew there had been rumors of more bacon “research”, but I wasn’t expecting much, given various circumstances.  But this turned into quite the bacon extravaganza!  We had five (5) bacon dishes to test.  Of course, I took some pictures to go with my analysis and commentary.  First up is bacon-wrapped pineapple — on a stick.

It seemed weird to mix bacon with a fruit, but it didn’t taste too bad.   The texture was weird to me.  But pineapple by itself has a somewhat weird texture.  Nonetheless, it was pretty good, but was overshadowed by some of the other bacon experiments.

Next up in our buffet of bacon was bacon-wrapped Twinkies.  How would you expect this to be?

We were skeptical about it before, but it proved to be the tastiest of them all.   The key here was cooking the bacon prior to wrapping the Twinkies.   Once wrapped, we placed them in the oven just long enough to heat the Twinkies (and we did it too much, as evidenced by the creamy overflow).  The taste was great — a pleasant mixture of bacon and sweetness, and it was not greasy at all (which was my main concern before trying it).  I would definitely eat these again… and again… 🙂

Next we made small sausage balls (of just pork / breakfast sausage), wrapped in bacon, and held together with toothpicks.  We had intended to apply the BBQ sauce before cooking, but didn’t add it until about halfway through cooking.

These were very delicious.   (Would you expect otherwise?)  You just have to make sure the sausage gets cooked thoroughly.  And be sure to cook these on a raised rack of some kind to let the bacon grease and sausage grease drain off.  Failure to do so may result in a “gut-bomb”.  (For a documented example of that, see the second comment about our initial Buffet o’ Bacon.)

Next up was a BLT — bacon, lettuce, tomato sandwich, with Miracle Whip.  Nothing revolutionary, and tasted like you would expect.

Last but not least in our “research” was chocolate-covered bacon.  The bacon was cooked first, with all grease drained, then dipped in molten chocolate.   The molten chocolate was made from semi-sweet chocolate chips plus butter.

Chocolate-covered bacon may sound gross if you haven’t tried it, but it’s quite delicious.   The salty bacon goes well with the sweetness of the chocolate.   You really should try it for yourself sometime.

If you would like to read about our other Buffet o’ Bacon events, here’s a link to search the blog for “Buffet o’ Bacon“.  (It will find a few other posts which reference it, but using a search will also find future ones, too, once they’re published.)  You could also have your own bacon research parties.  It’s a really fun time (as you would imagine).  You could post your results on your blog, and be sure to link back here so we can check it out.

food critic, bacon sandwich

Regular reader Mango-Man sent in a picture of a bacon sandwich.   It’s not one he made, but it looks intriguing.  There is definitely plenty of bacon!  But it still seems to be lacking something.

What do you think should be done to make this bacon sandwich better?

(If you enjoy being a food critic, this is part of an ongoing series we have.  Click on Food Critic in the sidebar to see the other ones.)

food critic, fancy minimalist plate

After an unintended break in this series, here’s another entry in our food critic category.  If you’re new here, it’s easy to play.  I’ll post a picture of food and you be the food critic.  You can discuss what works with the dish or what doesn’t work well, and you can make suggestions about what should be done to make this dish better.  Simple enough, huh?

FYI, I don’t know what this is, exactly, so just use your best guess.  And have fun with it.  (If you haven’t noticed, randomness is the usual order around here.)