Eating

Bakin’ bacon

4 Comments

or

How to Make Perfectly Crispy Bacon Without Getting Bacon Grease All Over Your Shirt

works for me wednesday at we are that familyEach and every time I want to make bacon, I Google “bacon in the oven” and find a post called “How to Make Perfect Bacon.” And then I make some bacon, and it is quite nearly perfect, and I don’t have grease splatters all over my person. I thought I might make things a little easier on myself by saving the link and my few alterations to the recipe here for posterity. And also because I’m making some bacon today for sandwiches later and so it seemed like a good day to take some pictures of bacon.

Step One


Put some bacon on a baking sheet. The instructions over yonder say to line it with aluminum foil to make cleanup easier. I have yet to be convinced that it does make cleanup easier, because there’s still quite a bit of bacon grease to deal with when all’s said and done. But I always use foil anyway, because I’m a rule follower.

Make sure the bacon doesn’t overlap. I learned this the hard way. If your bacon overlaps, it won’t achieve maximum crispocity.

Step Two

Set the oven to 400 degrees. Put the bacon in while the oven is still cold. I don’t understand why, exactly, but who am I to question the ways of the bacon?

Step Three

Walk away for 13 minutes. Enjoy the smells of bacon.

Step Four


Flip the bacon slices over. Put them back in the oven. Walk away for 13 more minutes.

Step Five

Put the bacon on some paper towels to drain away some of the grease. Dispose of the bacon grease. (Don’t pour it down the drain. I usually pour it into a big jar that I keep under the sink. When it’s full, I throw it away. Other people use it to season veggies and other foods.)

Step Six


Try not to eat all the bacon before dinner.

(I haven’t done a Works for Me Wednesday post in a long time, but this is a trick that’s been working for me a lot lately. So I thought I’d share it.)

Family matters

Things to do with the kids this summer

9 Comments

Summer 2010. Bay City, Michigan.
June 20th is the official first day of summer this year. But today it’s over 80 degrees out there, the bees are buzzing around like mad and we only have 16 days of school left. All this means I’m thinking Summery Thoughts today, which made me remember that this time last year I was seeing lots of “Summer Bucket Lists” on the blogs.

A little googling turned up quite a few lists from last year, including one person doing a “Summer Bucket List Party.” I wish that meant I got to attend all of the fun stuff she has planned for the summer, but it doesn’t. It just means other people are linking to their summer lists on her page, which is also fun even if it isn’t a hot dog roast under the stars.

Anyway, I thought this year I might make my own list of things that would be fun to do this summer. I would be terribly surprised if we actually did everything on the list, but it’ll give us somewhere to start when the I’m Boreds begin. By which I mean yesterday, because someone is bored every 15 minutes.

(Fact: My mom used to tell me that “only boring people get bored” when I told her I was bored. I always thought that was kind of mean. She also told me she played with sticks and rocks when she was a kid. Which tells me that she was definitely bored, too.)

Things That Would Be Fun To Do This Summer

  • Pick strawberries
  • Get ice cream from an ice cream truck
  • Make homemade pickles
  • Visit the farmers market. { June 1. We bought a bag of marshmallow bits, fresh corn, strawberries, blueberries, peaches, trail mix and Swedish fish. }
  • Make sun prints
  • Send someone a care package
  • Play on a slip-and-slide
  • Make sidewalk paint
  • Catch lightning bugs
  • Wade in a creek. { May 28. And it made us want to go camping. }
    Yep, those are my toes.

  • Go fishing
  • Make homemade marshmallows
  • Go on a boat ride
  • Have a water balloon fight
  • Play mini golf
  • Make tie-dye shirts
  • Take a nap outside
  • See an outdoor concert; take a picnic
  • Host an movie night in the backyard
  • Make jam
  • Pick blueberries at Rockford’s grandmother’s house
  • Complete a summer reading program
  • Make International Food Passports for the kids
  • Let Poppy set up a lemonade stand. { June 2. In conjunction with our yard sale. She made $17! }
  • Make popsicles
  • Make mud pies
  • Do an ice excavation
  • Sit back and unwind

    • I found inspiration for my list from “50 Ideas for Your Summer Bucket List” at Daring to Live Fully. What are your plans for the summer?

    Reading

    I’m guessing ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ will do me in

    1 Comment

    Every now and then I start feeling like my education is lacking, so I launch a reading project. Like that time I decided to read all of the Modern Library’s top 100 books and then only read (I think) 5 of them because they were so depressing.

    Well, folks, we’ve entered another of those Every Now and Thens.

    This time I’m working off the Great Books list in Susan Wise Bauer’s “The Well-Educated Mind.” They’re all books I probably should have read at some point in high school or college. They’re also all books I’ve never read. It should only take me ten or twenty years to read them all.

    Picasso's sketch of Don Quixote, 1955
  • “Don Quixote,” Miguel de Cervantes
  • “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” John Bunyan
  • “Gulliver’s Travels,” Jonathan Swift
  • “Pride and Prejudice,” Jane Austen
  • “Oliver Twist,” Charles Dickens
  • “Jane Eyre,” Charlotte Bronte
  • “The Scarlet Letter,” Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Harriet Beecher Stowe
  • “Madame Bovary,” Gustave Flaubert
  • “Crime and Punishment,” Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  • “Anna Karenina,” Leo Tolstoy
  • “The Return of the Native,” Thomas Hardy
  • “The Portrait of a Lady,” Henry James
  • “Huckleberry Finn,” Mark Twain

    • I started “Don Quixote” a few weeks ago, and it is making me feel like a big doofus. From what I gather, this is the First Novel Ever and it is Very Funny and also Wonderful. I’m only on Chapter 19, but I’m just not that into it. Don Quixote seems like a big jerk, and there’s enough scatological humor to launch a Johnny Knoxville franchise.

    I’m hoping things will change soon in the next one billion pages. (Seriously. I had no idea how long this book was.)