Hi guys. It's Nora. I thought i'd mix it up a little this week and have my husband Mike write a guest post. He's no culinary mastermind, but he definitely has some strong opinions about what he likes and emphatically DOES NOT LIKE to eat, so I thought i'd let all of you in on the inner workings of his mind, which I am lucky(?) enough to experience on a daily basis.
After reading the title of this post, I can only imagine some of the reactionary negative commentary: “Bacon is amazing man!” “Chocolate is transcendent!” “You’re a moron!” “Who is this idiot and why is he allowed to post on Food Lush?”
To be absolutely clear, I love bacon. I’m kind of fond of chocolate. They’re both delicious at the right time and in the right doses. They’re just not the otherworldly, palette-transforming, sonnet-inspiring foods they’re made out to be. Rating from 1-10, bacon is a solid 9.5, maybe 9.75. It’s not a 50. It doesn’t deserve dedicated websites. It doesn’t need to be the subject of countless, exhausting “everything is better with bacon” zingers (cereal and yogurt come to mind as things decidedly not better with bacon).
Maybe that’s where I’m ultimately annoyed with the mythos surrounding bacon. People automatically think that adding (more) bacon to a dish will inevitably make it tastier and more appealing. There’s an inherent laziness to the “just add bacon” mentality. To use a personal experience, a dear friend once brought to a gathering homemade bacon-flavored vodka, waiting for us to be wowed. It was revolting. Fast food joints are positively criminal in this regard, with the offender of all time in my eyes being Wendy’s and their Baconator. Wow, what’s that? Six or ten or whatever strips of bacon? Must be incredible, right? It’s the most awful, sodium-drenched garbage I’ve ever eaten, and I love sodium.
Chocolate I’m less gung-ho about in my quest to brand it overrated, as I’m not extraordinarily fond of it to begin with. I mean it’s pretty good, maybe coming in a 7.5 on the 1-10 scale. Again, it’s not a 50. And don’t even bother me with that chocolate-covered bacon nonsense. Foul. Let’s take two great things and make them into one terrible thing? No thanks.
I just never got the chocolate obsession. The chocolate-covered-in-chocolate-dipped-in-seven-kinds-of-other-chocolate-baked-in-chocolate-death-by-chocolate-ad-infinitum things that seem to be plastered across every dessert menu I see. As with the sodium overload, there is also a cocoa overload. Not to mention that such obsessions would too often ruin several minutes of a perfectly good television program.
So stop it. Stop the deification of what are two very fine food products, ON THEIR OWN. Stop it before someone gets hurt or before I become more mildly annoyed. It’s unfair. It’s holding these things to a standard that cannot possibly be reached and it’s producing far too many hacky, ridiculous “recipes” like this one. Let bacon and chocolate be good in their own regard. Stop forcing them to be something they’re not.
Yeah, maybe I’m an overanalyzing, cynical, joy-stomping buzzkill, but that’s obviously why my wife fell in love with me, married me, and allowed me to post these rantings here under her name, right? Thanks for reading. Rant right back at me.
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