O.B.'d Again...

Although I am a practicing fishetarian, I have a weakness for bacon. When I first stopped eating meat almost 20 years ago, I missed several meat categories. I used to miss eating turkey, ham steaks, and bacon. Then I tried these longed for foods many years ago after several years of not eating meat and found them gross. There is something about the texture of meat that is really strange if you don't eat it for a long time. The only meat that lingers on in my affections is bacon. Something about the salty, fatty, crunchiness of bacon keeps me coming back for more.

I have a deal with myself where I get to eat bacon once a year. I know, it is a pretty random decision (why once??) but it is a compromise that I can live with. For the past several years I have broken my arbitrary rule and had bacon twice or three times within a year. Last year we were staying at a dude ranch in Texas with my Stu, Barbara, and Jim (and all of our kids) and they had a breakfast buffet that included bacon. I ate bacon two mornings in a row and by the second morning I was sick of it. I call this condition, "over baconed". I have been over-baconed once or twice in the past.

If you only eat bacon once a year there is something of a strategy to timing it right. You don't want to eat your bacon on New Year's day because then you have a whole 364 days to go without bacon. This year I made it to the first day of April before having my celebratory bacon. I was out to lunch at a restaurant with a new park intern and they had BLTs on the menu. I haven't had a BLT with real bacon in 20 years (I make BLTs at home with fake bacon every once and a while. They aren't bad). So I had a BLT. There was so much bacon on that sucker - by the end of the meal I was over-baconed. That's it for my bacon consumption for 2008. It was delicious.