fatbastardeats.com

photo credit: rick
Making sausage has always been a monstrous pain in the ass. And considering how easy it is to make bacon, sausage’s better looking cousin, why bother. Sausage splatters all over the place, it’s impossible to tell if it’s done without cutting it open and the god dam patty shrinks 40%. That’s like starting with Kim Kardashian’s rack and ending up with Paris Hilton. No thank you.

But then like a bolt of insight from Elijah I had an idea. Couldn’t I cook sausage in the oven the same way I do bacon? Wouldn’t slow, even heating work for both? So I tried and it does. In fact, it works amazing. One slight problem is you don’t get a good crust on the sausage patty this way, but I flipped my toaster oven to broil at the end and that fixed that. And in addition to being no mess(if you put the patty on some aluminum foil) what’s really nice is this way there’s no maintence. One of the huge hassles with making sausage is watching to ensure the house doens’t burn down, not a problem in the oven.

So for breakfast tommorow throw a couple of sausage patties in the toaster oven at 400 degrees and finish them off with the broil setting. You’ll get perfect, regular sized, cooked through patties every time.

You’re welcome.

So I got into work Friday and the old man across from me slumps into his cube and takes out some generic, crappy, frosted protein bar. He noticed my look of disgust and apologized “Hey, it’s better than McDonalds, right?”

After I beat him to death I gave his corpse the same lecture I’m gonna give you.

Breakfast is not a meal, it’s a birthright. It was earned by our fathers and our fathers’ fathers and it is one of the greatest gifts they leave us second only to our last names and the ability to pee standing upright.

And yet so many weak, small minded guys have this impression that if a woman doesn’t make it for you then you can’t have a decent breakfast. That it’s a magical reward they conjure whole hock from an ether of love and estrogen. These guys are all single, because married men know that women don’t make breakfast anymore. But they’ve given up on life too fully to make it for themselves. So men resign themselves to a piddling of cold milk on some sugary fiber.

Well I say bullshit. Cereal is not breakfast. McDonalds is not breakfast. Any combination of the word ‘protein’ with something else is not breakfast. Breakfast, true breakfast, requires copious amounts of heat, butter and the flesh of a deceased swine.

I know you have a hundred excuses, but they all boil down to “I don’t have time” and that’s a God Damned lie. That day, I explained to the remains of my former co-worker, I had 2 eggs, 2 pieces of toast and 2 to 8 pieces of bacon(when I start eating bacon I kind of get into a zone, so it’s hard to count). It took 10 minutes of attention and 15 minutes total, you’ll spend more time in the drive through at Carl’s Jr.

The real problem is thought. Thought is the enemy of action. When you think “Should I make breakfast?” your head is already so full of unclear scenarios you don’t know where to start and eventually you talk yourself out of it. Well I know how to deal with people who think.

Here’s the agreement you and I will make. I’m going to lay out each step and how long it will take you, and you’re going to make yourself breakfast for a week. One week, following this exact formula. Once you’ve done it for a week, there’s no more need for thought. You won’t find yourself looking around the kitchen wondering where to begin, you’ll just do.

Step 1: Bacon, the cornerstone of both breakfast and happiness. Go ahead and throw some bacon in an oven as described here. I keep the cookie sheet covered with foil at all times just to make this go faster. At this point I also get out 2 eggs and the butter and set them on the counter.

Time 1 minute

Step 2: Go upstairs to shit, shower and shave. This can be a bit tricky, I know my oven gets up to temperature in 7 minutes and if I don’t mess around I get finished up in exactly that amount of time, but you may have to push some activities until after breakfast. I suggest you don’t skip the shit part, you need to make room for a hearty breakfast.

Step 3: Back downstairs, check the bacon then throw a pan over a medium flame. Spray it with Pam and crack your now room temp eggs into it. Hit them with a pinch of salt(Kosher, as always) and a few grinds of black pepper. Please don’t skip that part, unseasoned eggs taste exactly like the gelatinous sacks of fat and protein that they are. They <i>need</i> salt and pepper, and some red pepper flake if you got it.

Time 30 seconds

Step 4: Slice some bread up and pop in your toaster. And for the love of all that is holy use some real bread here. Every grocery store in the country now has their own bakery that’s producing stuff a damn sight better than Wonder bread. That stuff doesn’t so much toast as accept the cleansing flame of judgment.

Time 30 seconds

Step 5: About now you should pull the bacon out of the oven probably. If you used a cooling rack it’s good to go but if you had to let it sit in it’s own juices just lay it on some brown paper bags or newspaper. That’ll pull the grease right off.

Time 30 seconds

Step 6: Now flip the eggs(or don’t, I like mine over easy) and turn off the flame. If you had your heat right almost immediately after the flip your eggs are ready to go onto the plate. Remember, eggs keep cooking after you take them off the heat, so if you leave them in the pan they will dry out.

Time 15 seconds

Step 7: Now when your toast pops just spread on the butter(real butter, in addition to being worse for you margarine tastes like plastic and cheese had a baby) and put it and the bacon on the plate.

Time 30 seconds

Step 8: Eat.

Time 45 seconds.

I know that seems fast, but I grew up with brothers. If you didn’t eat fast you ate less, and the Fat Bastard is not going to eat less.

Step 9: Clean up. All you have to do is throw out the foil, re-cover the cookie sheet, wash 1 plate, 1 pan, 1 spatula, 1 fork and 1 knife. You can actually leave the dishes in the sink but always make sure to wash your cooking utensils and pans as you use them so you can depend on them to be ready next time. Unless you have a stack of 30 pans, then just throw this one out and grab the next.

Time 2 minutes.

There you go. 6 minutes and zero thought gets you a full gut for the morning. Because starting your day with a belly full of frosted protein is for Tijuana hookers.

It has been posited in response to I Love Bacon that an even easier method of cooking bacon exists in the microwave.

I am surrounded by Vandal’s and simpletons.

Look, the microwave is great at what it does; agitating water molecules to create heat. If I want to heat up a bowl of soup there’s no better choice. But don’t try and use it for what it’s not intended, particularly cooking meat. It cannot create the all important browning that meat needs because it’s essentially steaming it.

So your bacon isn’t really crisp, it’s just dry. You’ve essentially started to make bacon jerky and then quit really early in the process. I’m all for convenience but if something is worth making then it’s worth the extra 4 minutes to make correctly.

And bacon is so worth making.

I love bacon.

It’s the perfect synthesis of all your basic food groups, meat and fat. It’s welcome for dinner, lunch or breakfast. It’s great by itself, on the side or when wrapped around another food product. In fact, if you could wrap bacon around bacon you might create a nexus of awesome so great the world as we know it would end and an entirely new and perfect universe would open up. I love bacon.

Which is why when someone complains about it being too much work to make I want to claw their eyes out with a fork. They’ve put no effort into maximizing their bacon intake while minimizing the clean up. Making bacon is quick, easy and requires absolutely zero clean up.

All you need is a cookie sheet, a cooling rack and a cold oven. Layer the cookie sheet with aluminum foil(I told you no clean up) and put the cooling rack on top. You don’t technically need the rack, but it keeps the bacon out of it’s own grease and helps it brown up real nice.

Then just drop that bad boy in a cold oven, turn the temp to 400 and let it go. By allowing the bacon to heat up with the oven you’re giving it time for the fat to render off. If you’re one of those philistines who like soggy bacon, then you can pre-heat the oven and put the bacon in after. I wouldn’t do that though, because I love bacon.

How long do you cook it at 400? Well, that depends. About 2 minutes, but you have to be really careful because bacon goes from done to charcoal ribbons in about 30 seconds. Luckily this is the one case where you can keep opening the oven door and you won’t hurt a thing, so I say just keep an eye on it and don’t worry about the time.

What’s that? You’re one of those sad, divorced guys who only has a toaster oven and an I.O.U. where your dignity used to be? No problem, we can make that work too. I wouldn’t want to compound your misery by leaving you without bacon as well.

Just line your sad little toaster tray with foil, drape it with bacon and pop it in at 200 degrees. Once it reaches temperature bump it up 25 degrees every minute or so until you get to 350. By then it should be perfect.

Did I mention that I love bacon?