How to Bake Bacon

My day begins and ends in an apron.  Don't be fooled though.  In no way does this indicate that I can cook.  I mean, I can follow a recipe, but I am no chef by a long shot.  There is no a little here and a dash there.  I need step by step instructions and exact measurements.  I simply wear the apron for functional purposes.  For starters, it has pockets.  I don't think I even own a pair of pants with pockets.  Secondly, I can't even count the amount of times that I am washing my hands due to wiping snotty noses (can't wait till winter's over), wiping booties, changing diapers and cleaning who knows what off of who knows where.  For instance, I reached behind the TV the other day looking for something and it was all sticky back there.  What in the world?    I reached a little further and found a sippy cup filled with apple juice.  Well that explains the sticky.  I thought those things were supposed to be spill proof!  Anyway, it's just easier to use the apron to wipe my hands on.  It's more economical that way too, less paper towels!  It also saves me from the kids wiping their gnarly fingers and noses on me.  I'm not saying that I wear nice clothes or anything, but come on...nobody wants to walk around with food and sneezes embedded in your clothes!  By the end of the day I actually do use it for cooking.  I'm not a fan of grease stains either.  I'm sure Brian loves coming home to me looking all domestic.  Especially since he got me a new snazzy apron for Christmas.  But he's not fooled either, he knows the truth.

It's only been a year now since I've been in charge for cooking dinner.  Before Brian was getting home in time to cook and now it's up to me.  I miss the good old days.  I do however have a new found appreciation for Google.  I've Googled how to bake chicken, how to cook hamburgers...how to boil water.  Nah, I'm just kidding...I know how to cook a hamburger!  One of my favorite Google finds is how to bake bacon.  I love that terminology, bake bacon.  I even found a comment that some guy had left about crinkling up aluminum foil so that the bacon grease has somewhere to fall.  It comes out perfect every time.  Nice and crispy.  One of my cooking accomplishments that I can be proud of!  Big deal right? 

So last night I decided that we would have bacon, egg and cheese biscuits for dinner.  It sounded good at the time, until I realized that the oven would be occupied and let's face it...nobody likes to eat a cold biscuit.  I guess I'll cook my bacon the old fashioned way.  The Stove.  Que "dum dum dum" music.  You see, the kitchen and I have sort of a love/hate relationship.  I love the oven, but hate the stove.  We are a work in progress.  Well for some strange reason, I thought that I could wing this whole stove top bacon thing.  How hard could it be?  Apparently, very hard because this is what it looked like:

 Are you laughing yet?  Maybe you need a closer look:

I bet I don't have to tell you what our house smelled like.  Brian was walking in just as I was taking the last piece out of the pan.  Judging by the first piece I knew that I had done something wrong.  He looked at it and I burst out laughing.  "What temperature did you cook it on?"  No response.  "Medium?" I shook my head.  "High???" I nodded.  "You know you're not supposed to cook anything on high except water."
Hmm, you would have thought Google would have mentioned that little tid bit of information.  "I know."  I told him.  "I don't know why I did."  And then Brian (and this is one of the reasons I love him) ate a piece of the burnt bacon!  "Yummmm" he said nodding and grinning back at me.

But my battle with bacon did not stop there.  My next attempt was to microwave it.  Brian said he'd heard of people doing it, but never did it himself.  Despite his skepticism, I nuked it anyway.  Besides the fact that the paper towels were flooded with grease, the bacon was a color that I had never seen before.  It's like the bacon had one of those really bad spray tans.  You know that orangy tan? 

This does not do the bacon the orange justice it deserves.

Brian boldly popped a piece in his mouth.  I nibbled at mine.  It was awful.  It tasted like a thick, crispy paper towel.  Literally like eating cardboard.  "This is just bad"  I told him.  "Let's just eat sausage instead and you take over from here."  So he scrambled some sausage in with our eggs and we piled that into a biscuit.  Which by the way, turned out nice and fluffy.  Like I said, the oven and I get along just fine.

After dinner Brian carried Riley upstairs to give her a bath.  About half way up he hollered down to me, "Hey, who ate all that bacon?"  I sprang up from my chair and rushed to the plate of the spray tan bacon only to find 2 pieces left.  "I cannot believe you ate that!!"  "Neither can I, but I just couldn't stop!"

In case you are interested I will share with you my culinary secret on how to bake bacon.  This is something that only the pros know how to do!  http://busycooks.about.com/od/quicktips/qt/bakingbacon.htm