The Bacon Explosion

    In June I got bored with just working and going to class all the time and decided that an experiment in food was well called for. Really it wasn't so much "experimental" since I was following a method, not really a recipe, but it was new for me and everyone else involved.

    We decided to make an event of it and had the Heart Attack Dinner. Served would be one whole bacon explosion, a double batch of my grandmother's Sour Cream Biscuit recipe, personal-size macaroni and cheese casseroles, and Chocolate Peanut-Butter Brownies.

    First the simple things: the Mac and Cheese and the Brownies were just like normal recipes for the same thing except I split them into a muffin pan so that all of the dishes for the night would come out around the same size. The brownie recipe was modified by adding peanut-butter chips, like chocolate chips only peanut-butter flavored.

    Next, the Bacon Explosion. The method of making a bacon explosion can be found multiple places around the internet, so I'll be brief here and include pictures as I have them.

1. Take your raw bacon and weave it, like a basket, into a tight lattice around 5 strips in each direction. It's very important that you get a tight weave or you'll run into problems later.
2. Apply to the top of this your sausage in a fairly flat layer, making sure to leave some space around the edges for when you roll it.
3. The first deviation that I had was now. I added a pound of shredded cheese, because cheese is delicious.  I also added some dried minced garlic, a little bit of salt, and some ground black pepper.
4. After that I crumbled some previously cooked bacon on top of it. Shown here with a handy T-Square provided by one of my friends, and dinner attendees, Julie.
5. After that it was a complicated matter of rolling it. When I said earlier to make a tight weave and leave room around the edges, this was why. If you didn't do those things it's gonna be really big, bursting at the seams, and just not very nice looking.
6. After you manage to get it rolled up into a nice log shape, you bake it. Most recipes call for adding BBQ sauce inside before you roll it and brushing it on the outside before smoking it. I didn't have any BBQ sauce, don't really care for the stuff, or a smoker, so I used what I did have: the oven.
7. Once it's finished baking let it cool some to set the grease juices before slicing it into rings and serving. 

In that last picture you can see the Macaroni and Cheese bites on their plate, and the bowl containing the biscuits.

    The results of this dinner were amazingly delicious, if horribly unhealthy. This is not a food for the faint of heart. I may make this again in the future using what I've learned, but probably not for a while.