BACON

Boat camping was my first real experience with camping. Unlike camping in the woods, your campsite is incredibly portable. Unlike using an RV, there’s significantly less storage space and a lot more exposure to the elements. When I was 13, my dad took my sister and me on our first annual boat trip. The morning we left, we piled all of our camping gear into the Jeep as Dad hooked it up to our boat’s trailer. We left home as dawn was breaking to drive up I-5 from Portland to Seattle.

Arriving in Bellingham, we transferred our gear to the boat and my sister and I started finding stowage spots for everything as Dad backed the boat into the water. It was the start of a week of adventure where we took our little 21-foot power boat through the Puget Sound. Before we knew it, we were off - bouncing across the waves with salt spray causing our hair to stand out at weird angles. Sea birds spiraled overhead as we scanned the horizon for signs of orcas. As we cruised past smaller, uninhabited islands, we imagined living there and ruling over our own little domain. We boated for hours. Who knew what would await us at our first marina?

The one guarantee no matter where we docked was food. One of the best parts of boating is the food. A combination of fresh air and isometric activity consistently left us famished by the time we reached port. On that first day, Dad fired up the barbeque grilled shish-ka-bobs for dinner. Great big hunks of steak sandwiched between onions and green bell peppers filled our bellies that night. Later in the evening, as my sister and I converted the boat’s seats into our beds for the night, we reveled in our new experiences and the future promises of the trip. We fell asleep with dreams of what awaited us in the morning.

And what awaited us was bacon.

We woke up and broke out the camp stove. As Dad was heating up the stove, we rummaged through the 150-qt ice chest for that morning’s breakfast. Eggs and pancakes were par for the course, but the prize of the morning for my 13-year-old self was the brand new pack of bacon. I come by my love of bacon naturally - Dad picked up a pack just before we left to guarantee that we’d have bacon with our breakfast every morning.

Breakfast was over too quickly. We finished our food and my stomach still complained of emptiness. “I’m just going to make a few more slices of bacon,” I informed them as I went to restart the stove. This is the point in history where Dad learned several important lessons:

1) Never leave me alone with an open pack of bacon.

2) A teenager can eat an entire pack of bacon and not only not be sick to her stomach, but still be hungry.

3) One pack of bacon may suffice for a day, but it will never last a week.

_____________________________________________________

 

As I’ve matured, I’ve gained a little more self control around bacon.  Sometimes I even remember to share. But I’m still a sucker to try any recipe that has “bacon” in the title.

I was browsing through new recipes at Allrecipes.com and I stumbled on Bacon-stuffed Ravioli. There was no way I’d pass up making this recipe.

First order of business was procuring the ingredients. My last recipe was sourced so easily I was a little disappointed. I didn’t want to have the same ordeal that I had finding coconut milk, but a little bit of adventure through the grocery store can be fun. And this recipe didn’t disappoint. I needed to find wonton wrappers. I’d brought my friend Tiff with me for company and so I could use the carpool lane on the freeway. We started off with the daunting 2’ wide section of “Asian foods” offered by our grocery store. It wasn’t there, but we weren’t exactly expecting wonton wrappers to be sitting with dried goods.

Next idea was the freezer section. I found bread dough. Aside from that, there wasn’t even a hint of phyllo pastry dough! Tiff was equally unsuccessful so we began the hunt for an employee. When we came across a guy in the dairy section we asked where we could find wonton wrappers and I was floored when he responded, “They’re on aisle one.”

We only had to ask one person! How… odd.

We made our way to aisle one (on the opposite side of the store from the Asian food display) and sitting right next to the tofu and the ricotta cheese were packages of potsticker/gyoza wrappers. I think I should have started doubting the recipe at this point.

We got home and it was time to get to work. Preheating the oven was simple. Completing step two provided a little more of a challenge.

Place a baking rack into a baking dish, and lay the bacon slices out flat onto the rack.

 

My baking rack is not fitting inside my baking dish. Maybe…

 

 

… No. How about…

 

 

BINGO.

 

It was time to bake the bacon. Take a moment, and read that last sentence aloud. Bake the bacon. Did it make you smile? I find myself giggling every time. Anyway, bacon bakin’ time:

 

 

 

I was really glad the recipe only called for eight slices – I don’t think there would have been an easy way for me to bake any more bacon. As the baking was supposed to take 25-30 minutes, I took that time to prepare everything else.

Ravioli involves lots of cheese.

 

Everything was divvied up for the filling (the clear bowl) and the Alfredo sauce (the tomato bowls)

 

 

I had everything by the stove ready and waiting. Waitin’ on the bakin’ bacon.

 

At the 25 minute mark, I checked on the bacon and it still looked fairly raw. I was supposed to bake the bacon until golden brown. At this rate, I’d be better off using a solar oven. So I removed the glass dish that was holding the bacon flat and reset the timer for another 10 minutes. At the 35 minute mark we were making progress, but hadn’t reached golden brown. Five more minutes. Half of the bacon was golden brown and crispy. The other half was getting there, but taking a longer route.

No amount of time delay will save you from your fate.

I removed the bacon that was done, drained the fat, and returned the undercooked bacon back to the oven.

 

Eight slices of bacon will give you almost exactly a quarter cup of drippings.

 

The remaining bacon reached appropriate crispiness at the 50-minute mark. With that wait complete, it was time to start assembly of my little ravioli minions.

 

 

In the lower right-hand corner of this picture, you’ll notice a bright white contraption with two handles. This is a ravioli/dumpling press. I have no idea where I got it. It’s been with my kitchen utensils for as long as I can remember. The press has traveled with me from Los Angeles to Oregon to Los Angeles to San Diego to Los Angeles once again. I have never used it. I don’t remember purchasing it. I’m fairly certain it spontaneously generated in my kitchen tools drawer one day. But it was here and I was making ravioli and it was amazingly useful:

 

Perfectly formed ravioli!

 

It’s a shame that the bacon was an essential part of the filling of the raviolis – the time it took to cook would have been a perfect time to be assembling all of my little decadent dumplings. Still, although it’s time consuming, there’s something remarkably peaceful about creating rows and rows of ravioli.

 

Dance my little minions!!!

 

I ended up making 40 ravioli and I set the remainder of the filling aside for an experiment later this week. It was time for the Alfredo sauce. I love a good cream sauce. Adding bacon drippings to a cream sauce? Sheer awesomeness. This was the first Alfredo recipe I’d found that called for cream cheese, but it worked well for the consistency of the sauce.

 

 

I tend to be a little more a traditionalist (says the girl happily adding bacon drippings) so I think in the future I’d prefer to forgo the cream cheese and milk and use heavy whipping cream instead. This recipe also called for adding a third of a cup of pasta water to thin the sauce. I didn’t add it because I’m a fan of a thicker Alfredo sauce, but I think again going a more traditional route for its ingredients, pasta water is unnecessary.

 

The ravioli cooked up quickly and it was time to mix everything together. And here’s where I encountered the problem. Potstickers are aptly named. When they get cooked, the dough that encapsulates them gets sticky. Using potsticker wrappers for ravioli led to bacon and cheese dumplings that stuck together in to a large congealed lump. It left a little to be desired on the presentation front.

I feel like I’m looking at a plate of schnitzel.

 

The other issue I had with the wrappers was the texture. When you’re in the mood for pasta and you’re making ravioli, you have an expectation of biting into a packet of deliciousness that’s held together by an al dente exterior. Not so much in this case.

 

Don’t get me wrong – the flavor of this was fantastic. I took a bite and I was rocketed back to childhood – not the boat trip in the San Juans, but the kitchen of our house in Arizona where we lived until I was eight. I knew this flavor. I couldn’t place it, but I knew it. So I texted my mom, “Did you ever make a meal for us when we were kids that involved bacon and cheese or a cream sauce? It would have been in the Arizona house.” She wrote back almost immediately, “Quiche Lorraine.” Ah ha. And that was it. This recipe tasted strangely like quiche. The texture wasn’t there, but the flavor was.

 

The final verdict on the recipe was that Tiff and John were fans. I was not. But I have a couple recipes planned for this week and Thursday will be the day of reckoning to determine if this recipe is salvageable as-is or if I really need to go on the search for pasta wrappers that I can use for future renditions.