Jesus H. Double-Doohickeys! It seems I’m forever impelled to start these entries with an apology since the posts continue as few and far between. But I need to get over it, at least as far as the last month or so goes since the Roberts’ household has been hectic and manic and demanding and screwy and one hell of a hindrance to gimcrack follies such as this this blog.

   There’s always something else to do around here. I’d finally gotten one book back to my agent but suspect he’s holding back on the publisher hunt until I finish the second. So I burn off all my writing juice proofreading and spit polishing that little fucking nightmare. Push my literary travails aside and there are still increasingly heavy bills to pay and taxes to prepare and ice in the driveway and playtime with the kids. And all that took a backseat to viruses when the kids went down with all manner of afflictions nearly two weeks ago – ralphing up rivers into rugs and couches or gushing cataracts from their fannies while their lungs swelled with slime. We saved a bit on groceries as neither child had any interest in food for about a week.  Jack looked like an Olsen twin and Elsie had the appearance of a wasted tramp desperate for a mainline of smack. They’re improving, but since Elisa went down in the wee hours of last night it seems like a good time to call in Bruegel and have him paint up The Great Plague of Mansfield.

   Sooooo… Where the hell am I going with this? No place really. Sometimes it’s easier to just scribble down a diuretic diary entry until something better comes to mind.  And something has! Breakfast is on the way and, pulling the bacon from the oven a few minutes ago, the olfactory arousal reminded of a post I’d intended to type a few weeks ago: The Bacon of the Month.

   This one oughta be easier than my Cookie of the Month since I don’t have to keep shoving things in my mouth hoping for inspiration. First off it’s bacon – a near perfect form of food to begin with it ain’t like any are going to soar above the rest. I just gotta pick one and say something nice about it, again a simple task because bacon falls under the same existential umbrella as oral sex – no normal person would pass up a chance to endure their worst experience with it twice.

   All that said, the BOTM gets even easier since Elisa and I now belong to an actual “Bacon of the Month Club”.  Get the out fuck out, you say. No it’s true. It’s a very real thing made possible by Christmas Magic. Or at least by my brother-in-law and his fiancée who gave us a year’s membership as one mother of a highly inspired gift. I loved it before I got the first installment… And it means all I got do is wait for my monthly pound of pork belly, eat it, and tell you about it.  Unless one of the artisanal meat smokers has come up with an avant garde manner of lousing up bacon I imagine my ratings will always fall between Pretty Freaking Delicious (poor) and Holy Crap, Scarlett Johansson Just Put Her Tongue in My Ear! (good) 

  With no further expenditures of horseshit here we go… The Bacon Choice for January 2009 (yeah, I’m late. Shut up): Vande Rose Farms Artisanal Dry Cured Applewood Smoked Bacon.

  At 13 bucks/12oz. one would hope this approaches that Scarlett Johansson ideal and, yes indeedy, it do. I was a little disappointed when I opened the box to find the word “Applewood” on the package. I was hoping for something more interesting or exotic. It’s not that I dislike applewood smoking but ever since the mid 90’s, when it replaced mesquite as the new hickory, it often seems like that’s just what everybody does.

   Nevertheless this slab was A-One, wicked yummy.  I roasted it at 325° until it was a nice brick red. Since thick-sliced bacon will never crisp all that well, you want to cook it slow so the meat doesn’t bind irrevocably into jerky. The Vande Rose stuff came out nearly tender as ham and, with some ripe tomatoes and some extra pepper, it turned out one of the baddest BLT’s ever to grace my mouth. We were all deeply sorry to see this princely slab disappear into our gullets.

   What is Vande Rose Farms’ secret to stunningly beautiful bacon?  They say it’s their Iowa Duroc Hogs, along with their feeding and processing methods, which include as gentle treatment for the animals as possible and dry-curing of the bacon. Common water-brining leads to crumbly fat and bacon that shrinks like crazy. Vande Rose Farms’ stuff barely changed size in the oven.  I’ll buy that andafter seeing a picture on their website I’d say their pigs are as pretty as anybody’s and the uniform, dense fat  alongside the tender meat means they’re doing things far better than over at the Khmer Rouge-style hog holocausts of the North Carolina pig conglomerates. 

   But is it worth 13 bucks for a package? If you asked me this a year or two ago I’d have said no f’n way.  But that was when you could get a decent store brand like Smithfield or Carando for about $3.50 or less. Now good supermarket bacon is pushing $6 so the occasional treat of kick-ass bacon like Vande Rose Farms doesn’t ring as all that terrible an idea. Use it to impress your friends in dinner party fare or just deem them unworthy and hoard the stuff to mollify your selfishly burning meat lust. It’s ok by me.

So that was a heck of a swell start to the club. Either we’re in for 11 months of very mild disappointment or perhaps something is coming which will blow my mind like a French kiss from an angel smoking heaven’s swankest cigarettes. Either way it’s going to be a fine year.