The bacon will be here today - 3/14/2007

I have just received automated word that my first delivery from the Bacon of the Month Club will arrive today, March 14th. Two years ago to the day, my daughter was born, so make of that what you will. Perhaps the cosmic implication is that this bacon blog is my new baby? And that it will grow into something wonderful and fascinating and I'll have to spend hours each day trying to convince the bacon blog not to climb into the sand-and-water play table because the bacon blog might fall out and crack its head open on the deck, thereby necessitating larding/stitches?

You will notice that I now embrace the term "blog" with both arms and a graceful, almost imperceptible brush of the cheek. I cannot do otherwise. It is like fighting a dying sea. Even a dying sea can crush you at the bottom of it, or float you for ages along disused trade currents. I will not go so gently into the goodnight that is "foodie," however. Everyone who uses that term, though there already were epicures, gastronomes, gourmets, and gourmands...well, shame on you. You sound like knee-dandling aunties, like a CEO named Charles who opts to go by the diminutive Chuckie. It's an idiotic term, and an embarrassment of the age. Like food is something we discovered in 1995. As though it were a novelty thing. There were already words, and good ones. Which are you? (These are pared down to their barest essence)

EPICURE/GOURMET: One who enjoys good food and drink.

GOURMAND: One who enjoys good food and drink in large quantities.

GASTRONOME: One who enjoys not just food, but its history and sociology.

Where does "foodie" fit in? I don't know. To me it rhymes with "poprophiliac."

The bacon will be here soon. At the outset, I have just amateurish ideas of how to use the stuff to its best ends. Carbonara. BLTs. Bacon-wrapped this-or-that skewers. Soup bases. Salad lardons. The old concepts you glean from a decade of reading cookbooks while never really getting your hands greasy.

On the other hand, I don't want to make a bacon foam in the shape of a hard-boiled egg, with a tourneed saffron-braised home fry "yolk" and agar-agar thickened mimosa sac "sunny-side up, slurped off the screen area of an iPod 'spoon,' to resemble consumption."

The delivery will be here in mere hours. Watch this space, as cheap billboard operators say when deadheading their overhead acreage.