With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

Chris M
Originally uploaded by madrobins

Via the fabulousness that is Cakewrecks, and is today focusing on, um, Redneck wedding cakes.

It's impeccably done, which just makes the WTFness of it the more impressive. Is this a wedding cake for two nature lovers or two hunters? And who gets to cut into the toppers (which I think are cake, too. Wow).

Go look at all the cakes. I'm particularly fond of the one with the camper-pickup driving up the steep mountain o' cake, but the one with the armed bride and scared deer is, um, affecting too.

I suppose some day someone will make a weird cake showcasing one or more of my obsessions (cakes? books? fencing? musical theatre?) and I'll have to laugh at it, too.

And The Odd Keeps On Coming

Ever wonder what's on the other side of Mount Rushmore?

Bacon Explosion

I am trying to lose weight (about 12 pounds so far...go me) so I very likely won't do this. And yet. And yet. It's a process-sort of cooking task, the sort of thing I want to try once, just because. And...two pounds of bacon and a pound and a half of Italian sausage. What's not to love?

Basically, you:

1) take ten strips of thick-cut bacon and weave them, five-by-five, into a mat.
2) take the remaining bacon from your 2 pounds and brown it, drain it, then crumble it.
3) spread the Italian sausage (caseless, of course) over the five-by-five bacon mat*.
4) spread the sausage with barbecue sauce and the crumpled bacon.
5) roll the sausage into a tight roll and crimp the edges.
6) roll the bacon around the sausage in a tight roll.
7) cook slowly (at 225°) for about three hours, either in a smoker or a oven.
8) serve in 1/4" to 1/2 inch servings.

That's 16 points, for Weight Watchers (out of my daily allowance of 20). So, probably no. Unless someone wants me to do it for them.

Mmmm. Bacon.



* I can't believe I just typed "five-by-five bacon mat."

Because it Seems That I Can't Stop Posting Today

I am so pleased: my Christmas gift(s) from my Lovely Aunt Julie(tm) arrived today!

The first is a second bowl for my Kitchen Aid mixer. This means that if I'm making something that needs two things beaten (like, say, cake batter with beaten egg-whites) I don't have to shuffle things from one bowl to the next in order to do it. So: YAY!

The second is a book I saw reviewed and decided at once I had to have: The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, by Rose George. By the end of the third paragraph I knew this was going to be a fun, and useful, and illuminating book. She discusses trying to find a bathroom in the Ivory Coast (she is escorted to a small, white tiled room with "no toilet, no hole, no clue," and the young guy who guides her to it seems to find some schadenfreudean pleasure in her confusion). Then she talks about finding the "Ladies" in the British Museum, where there's a clean toilet on every floor.

I do what I have to do, then flush the toilet and forget it, immediately, because I can, and because all my life I have done no differently.
This is why the Liberian waiter laughed at me. He thought that I thought that a toilet was my right, when he knew it was a privilege.

Given the discussions that have been flying around LJ for the last couple of weeks, I expect to find myself slapped up side the head with my privilege as a westerner, a middle class, educated, white woman. It will be good for me, and more likely, it will be good for my writing.

Plus: factoids! YAY!