Chomp! Bacon! Bombs! Bots?

By Ron Aiken

“What can you wrap bacon around, guys?”

This was a real question I recently overheard someone say. Well, I thought she was a real person until those words came out of her face in that order, which makes me now think she’s a bot.

The bot had heard of bacon-wrapped shrimp, but that was it. Literally, with the plethora of cooking shows on a wide range of networks, a food-focused popular culture that has boosted our collective gastronomic intelligence to all-time highs so that even your grandmother knows what sriracha sauce is, with all our overall food knowledge and awareness on an upswing they’ve never before enjoyed thanks to the nets of inter, the ONLY information ALL these sources have been able to get inside her ears was that you can wrap shrimp with bacon. Other than that, she’s all out of ideas.

What do you even do with a person like that? Besides bodily harm or pernicious sniggering behind their back?

You can always write a column about it. Solution!

Bacon wrapped grilled cheese sandwich (BuzzFeed)

Now Chomp is not a big bacon-wrapper, mostly because while delicious with SO MANY THINGS NAME ANYTHING, wrapping bacon around something other than a steak is a tricky business for the home cook, not to mention messy. (Since my customers do not pay for their food, my motivation to really take go all haute cuisine on them regularly is practically nil, not to mention when I told my 10-year-old she could have anything on a pizza I was getting her, unlimited toppings, the sky is the limit, the depth of her crazy started and stopped – abruptly — at pepperoni. Womp wah.

BUT, back to the topic, just off hand I’d have NO problem wrapping bacon around watermelon, cantaloupe (I’ve had several prosciutto- and pancetta-wrapped melons at parties that were good, though admittedly not as good as I wanted them to be), or any sweet melon; apples, chicken; fish; eggs; toast; jelly (I KNOW IT CAN BE DONE!); pork (the madness of a bacon-wrapped fried pork chop with tasso ham gravy somehow pleases me a part of me I try not to acknowledge); asparagus, tomatoes; grilled zucchini or squash; cake; jalapenos; donuts; chocolate-covered anything (strawberries, pineapple or – OMG dare I even say this? — chocolate covered bacon WRAPPED IN BACON??!!).

Anyone can increase the list. A child. A dog. A Swede. Anyone with an active pulse and functioning brain qualifies as more likely than my co-worker to generate a food pairing with bacon, a thing you can actually wrap around other things with just a toothpick, which I’m confident was man’s earliest tool.

How prodigious is Bacon’s versatility? Just ask yourself who is America’s most prodigious actor, the one who has worked with the most people possible? Think that’s a coincidence? HELL NO!

Did you know that in World War II, bacon fat was used by the government to make bombs? BACON-WRAPPED BOMBS KILLED HITLER! (great story on that here, btw: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/04/reluctantly-turning-bacon-into-bombs-during-world-war-ii/360298/)

How unpatriotic can you be not to at least give bacon like five seconds of thought to what it might possibly be successfully wrapped around before giving up and asking the audience? You know who doesn’t like bacon? You know who doesn’t think about what it can be wrapped around?

Terrorists. Bacon-wrapped freedom-fry haters! Where are my bacon-wrapped French fries, anyway? Why can I not GET THOSE RIGHT NOW?

Oh well, I also hear it goes well with shrimp. Til next time, bots!

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