Cloaker Josh: Bacon Adventure: Too much bacon

I can here your cries of protest through the intertubes, "There's no such thing as too much bacon!!". Well, fictional person making this statement, maybe not for you... but I found my limit.

A couple Saturdays back, I strolled on down to the supermarket to grab some supplies for the pending Easter Sunday. My girlfriend was staying over, and assuming that our favourite cafe would be closed for breakfast (as the usual leisurely time of 1:00PM in the afternoon, normally), I wanted to get breakfasty ingredients to cook for the 'morrow.

I headed on down the aisles, grabbing the requisite eggs and milk before going to the deli to pick up some delicious bacon. Now, I really don't have a concept at the best of times as to how much deli meat I should buy, so I tend to over cater. I might be alone in this, but normally when I cook bacon I usually measure out my portion in strips. I somehow failed to realise that weighing it to find out its net weight in grams would equip me for this request.

"What'll it be?" The polite, but stern, lady wearing a hairnet asks. Her smile was friendly, but she possessed the cold, dead eyes of a killer. Okay, maybe I made that up; But it was distracting, nonetheless. I will blame her creepiness, and not my own ineptitude, for the next part.

"I'll, uh... get some bacon, please." I stammer my courteous request.

"What type?" she says, with what I assume was an inflection on sarcasm.

"I, er... um. That one, the short cut, please."

"How many grams?"

I really resent that she's forcing me to do this by the book. If I had been served by somebody with any semblance of kindness I might have let down my guard and admitted that I didn't know how many grams of bacon I required, but could tell them the amount of strips I'd like. With this woman however, I felt like the only acceptable answer I was allowed to make would have to be suffixed with a metric weight measurement.

500 grams seems like reasonable amount, right? By my math, that's almost half a kilo so I'd probably have some left over for the next day, too.

"500 grams, please."

It would have been fine if that was the end of it, to be sure. I would have had a bacon surplus but that's okay; better to have too much rather than not enough, right? That's when she threw the curve ball at me.

"We're running a special at the moment; if you buy 500 grams it'll be $8 and (some cent amount I can't rightly remember), however if you get a kilo it's only $10."

I'm a real sucker for up-selling on products sub-$50. I always feel compelled to say yes to these things... and yes is what I did say on this occasion.

Side note: I later found out by looking at my receipt that I actually paid almost $17 for this mountain of bacon, she hadn't correctly applied the discount. But really, that's my fault for not being attentive enough at the cash register.

So, after having breakfast with my girlfriend the next day, I was still in possession of a pig's amount of bacon. Another thing I'm really guilty of is buying a perishable item and not even beginning it before the expiry date.

"Not this time!"

I scream at nobody in particular. Damned if I'm gonna let good bacon go to waste. And so... bacon is what I proceeded to eat for the following week.

The first day was cool, 'cause I still had some eggs so I cooked myself some eggs and bacon with some barbecue sauce for dinner. That's a solid meal, right there! Eggs and bacon, breakfast of champions... although it was dinner time.

The second day, I was out of eggs. I had some stale bread though, so I toasted that and had bacon on toast. Little salt, little pepper... Barbecue sauce. Again, I could do worse.

By Day 3 I was out of general supplies... it was time to get creative. I checked in my fridge and found that I had some cheese slices (Tasty cheese, not plastic cheese). I cooked my bacon, and chucked the cheese slice on top. Added some barbecue sauce. There you go! Bacon and cheese! That's a thing, right? They wouldn't flavour Cheetos after it if it wasn't a thing, so it must be a thing. All I'm sayin'.

Day 4 was rough. I checked the fridge in hope of unearthing some mystery ingredient that would make everything alright... but all I could find was more cheese. Fuck it, bacon and cheese it is... again. Add some barbecue sauce.

Day 5 I was completely out of all goods other than bacon. Sure, I could've walked down to the supermarket and grabbed some carbonara ingredients, or at the very least some more eggs and bread to mix it up. Instead, I decided to man the frak up and eat some damn bacon! Also, I'm quite lazy. There was enough for about 2 and a half meals of bacon left at this point.

Not again!

I cooked all of them delicious strips in a huge pan, and ate them from a paper plate. With barbecue sauce. That plate was translucent by the time all of the bacon was consumed. The amount of bacon grease consumed over this last week would have been enough to lubricate a diesel engine.

So, there you have it. There can be too much bacon, at least for me. I'm going to have to spend the next week eating wheatgrass and tofu to make up for the damage I've probably caused my innards. But, I did get thinking; Maybe I didn't employ the correct strategy. There could have been a way to put the bacon to good use without eating it, perhaps? I created a couple of prototypes below.