Everyone from my mom, to my friends to my wife is always telling me that I need to eat better. Apparently things like deep fried nacho cheese and bacon weave grilled cheese sandwiches aren’t considered part of a “healthy diet.” What about the Cobb salad cone that I created? That’s gotta count for something right?
Recently, HelloFresh — a company that specializes in healthy meals that you prepare yourself at home — offered to send me a few of their selections for free so I figured, “why not?” After all, I’m sure my body is OK with me skipping the bacon and setting my deep fryer aside for a few days.
The whole concept behind HelloFresh is pretty cool. They send you all the fresh ingredients — and instructions — that you need to make really great meals really, really easily. In fact, each meal only takes 30 minutes to prepare. Price wise, you could definitely get the same ingredients for much cheaper at your local grocery store, but it’s sort of nice having the exact amounts of everything you need delivered right to your door.
Out of the three meals that HelloFresh sent me — Chicken Paillard, Cardamom Spiked Shrimp Pilau and duck breasts — I’m not sure if I can even pick a favorite. They all tasted great. Seriously, I’m terrible at following directions and even I couldn’t manage to mess any of these up. The only real issue I ran into was that one of the recipes used both parsley and rosemary and since they look pretty similar I had no idea which was which, but a quick Google search solved that problem.
Aside from the ease of everything though do you know what’s perfect about HelloFresh? I made their duck breast with cranberry sauce and rice recipe for my wife and not only did she love it, but on top of that she probably assumed that I put tons of effort into planning the whole meal when all I really did was grab the package off our front porch and follow the directions that came along with it. She doesn’t read my blog too often, so I figure that I’ve probably got at least a couple more weeks of me being in her good graces before she sees this and finds out the truth.
Could I eat stuff like this every day? No way, I need things like big greasy burgers in my diet, but it was definitely a nice change of pace. Interested in trying HelloFresh yourself? Use coupon code “HF-dudefoods” at checkout and you’ll receive 30% off your first delivery!
What do you do when you want a breakfast burrito, you’re out of tortillas and you have a freezer full of Nueske’s bacon? You grab a pound of it, weave it into a giant square and use that instead! Alright, so it wasn’t quite that easy, but in the end my bacon weave breakfast burrito still turned out even better than I’d hoped for.
After creating my bacon weave I cooked it in my oven for ten minutes at 375º just to get it to the point where the bacon was sort of starting to stick together. Then I took it out, drained the grease and topped the bacon weave with a pile of scrambled eggs, cheese, hash browns, chopped up breakfast sausages and diced red and green bell peppers. After that I folded it into a burrito, wrapped it up in aluminum foil and put it back in the oven for another 25 minutes.
Once my bacon weave breakfast burrito was done cooking I unwrapped it from the aluminum foil, let it cool for a few minutes, took a couple pictures and then picked it up to take a bite. I realized pretty quickly though that removing the aluminum foil in the first place was a pretty bad call and that after one bite it would probably completely fall apart, so I wrapped it back up, cut it in half and started eating it the same way you would with any other giant burrito.
My final verdict? Pretty, pretty good! It would be really difficult to eat if it wasn’t wrapped in aluminum foil, but then again, most huge burritos are. Alright, so what’s next now that I’ve made a bacon weave breakfast burrito, bacon weave pizza, a bacon weave grilled cheese and a mac & cheese pie with a crust made entirely out of bacon? Only time will tell….
I work in an office and every single day I go out to lunch. More often than not I end up at Taco Bell. There really isn’t any specific reason why I eat there so much, but that fact that it’s crazy cheap and I can be in and out in about ten minutes probably plays a small part in it.
If you’ve been to Taco Bell any time within the past couple years you’re probably familiar with their Meal Deal menu where for $2.49 you get either a Chicken Burrito, a Double Decker Taco, a Gordita Supreme or a Beefy 5-Layer Burrito plus a soda and a bag of Doritos. The weird thing about these deals is that the taco or burrito on its own along with a soda would already cost more than $2.49, so even if you don’t want a bag of chips you might as well just order the meal and get one anyway.
That’s my problem, I’m never in the mood for Doritos at lunch so I eat the rest of my food and then bring the bags of chips home where I toss them into my kitchen cabinet and sort of forget about them. Finally, after realizing that I had an entire cabinet full of snack size bags of Doritos I figured that it was finally time to do something with them, and that something involved a beer and bacon batter and my deep fryer!
For my beer and bacon batter I used the exact same recipe that I used when I made deep fried bacon and deep fried White Castle sliders, which pretty much just involves mixing equal parts flour and beer and then tossing in some diced bacon pieces. I was a little worried that the Doritos would lose their crunch after being deep fried, but they didn’t seem to at all. The hot oil also caused the batter to expand around the chips a little bit, so they sort of ended up looking like little puff pastries.
There are some recipes where I know going in that they’re going to turn out delicious, but this definitely wasn’t one of them. In fact, I wasn’t expecting too much from these deep fried Doritos at all, but they completely blew away my expectations. They tasted probably ten times better than I thought they would. I took a bite of one before I started taking pictures just to see how they were and before I knew it I’d finished five of them and had to stop myself from eating any more until I snapped a few photos first.
Seriously, is there a single food out there that isn’t better after being deep fried? After realizing how great deep fried Doritos are I think I need to work on incorporating Doritos into a an actual batter. Imagine how great chicken strips or cheese curds would taste after being deep fried in a batter made out of crushed up Doritos!
I don’t even remember where I originally found this recipe, but any time I make this pull apart bread it’s always a hit with people who have never eaten it before. I mean come on, its got bacon, Cheddar cheese, a ton of butter and it’s incredibly easy to make. What’s not to love?
Also, every single recipe I’ve seen for this type of bread calls for Bacon Bits, but nothing will ever top the deliciousness of fresh bacon, so if you plan on making this pull apart bread just do yourself a favor and spend an extra few minutes frying up some actual bacon.
Wanna make your own? Here’s how!
Ingredients:
1 round sourdough bread loaf, unsliced
8 ounces Cheddar cheese, shredded
6 strips bacon, cooked and diced
1/2 cup butter
1 tablespoon dry ranch dressing mix
Directions:
1. Preheat your oven to 350°.
2. Grab a bread knife and slice from side to side in both directions, leaving about an inch of space between each slice. Make sure that you don’t cut all the way through the bottom of your bread.
3. Stuff the cheese and diced bacon pieces between all the cuts in the bread.
4. Melt the butter, combine it with the ranch dressing mix and drizzle it over your bread.
5. Wrap the loaf of bread in aluminum foil and cook for 20 minutes or until all your cheese is melted.
Then, once your bread is out of the oven just do as the name suggests and pull it apart and eat it! Enjoy!
Last week I got a package in the mail from my buddies over at FoodBeast. Its contents? Eight half-pound burger patties from BacoBurger. I wasn’t familiar at all with what a BacoBurger even was, and all that was included along with my burgers was a packing slip, so I headed over to their website to read up on them.
As it turns out, their burgers are a blend of ground bacon and meat. They offer a few different varieties, but what I got were their Angus BacoBurgers, which consist of 50% ground bacon and 50% Angus beef. They also offer patties that have an 80/20 meat to bacon ratio, but after trying the 50/50 blend I can’t imagine any other mix tasting much better.
Since the burgers themselves are half bacon I just didn’t feel quite right frying one up and putting it on a regular bun, so I put together a couple bacon weaves and used those instead. Now, this might seem like more than enough bacon to most of you, but me, I can’t get enough of the stuff, so in keeping with the whole theme of the meal I also spread some bacon flavored Cheddar cheese that I got from WisconsinMade.com on top of my burger.
I’m just gonna cut straight to the chase on this one — these burgers are phenomenal! The patties were nice and juicy and the 50/50 mix of bacon and Angus beef was perfect. I have plenty of friends out in California who talk about how great the half ground bacon / half ground beef burgers at Slater’s 50/50 are, but I’ve never gotten a chance to eat there, so it’s nice to have finally been able to enjoy a similar burger.
