Pain in the Glass

Tuesday morning started out all wrong! I had just gotten naked, taken off my glasses and was going into the shower when I reached in the closet to get a fresh bar of soap. I knocked over the glass jar I kept my toothbrush in and it shattered on the tile floor!

I gingerly stepped over the broken glass that seemed to be everywhere and got the broom and dust pan. I hate broken glass, especially when my feet are bare, because it is so hard to see with bifocals. I swept the floor twice (just to make sure) and then took my shower. Sure enough, I stepped on a sliver of glass that was hidden, lodged in the bath mat. I pulled it out of my foot, folded the mat and set it on the kitchen counter to deal with after work.

I put a Band-Aid on the bottom of my foot and got dressed for work. All the broken glass went into a paper bag and out into the trash can. It was sprinkling then and rained off and on all day long.

I was going to just go home for lunch, but Michelle and Vicky talked me into going to the Newburgh Grill with them. I had the ham and bean soup and a French Dip sandwich.

After work, I shook out the bath mat and then vacuumed both the bathroom tile and the bath mat to make sure all the glass was gone. Then I went out back to check the rain gauge. It had 1/2 inch of rain in it! Which explains, I guess, why nobody cut my grass today. I got the trash can back from the road and into the garage and then closed the house up for the night.

I watched the rest of the news and when it was finished at 7:00 PM, I started making dinner. I wasn’t kidding about the BLTs, you know. Besides, it wasn’t that warm outside and so it was perfect for using the oven.

So, I cooked my bacon in the oven, as its less messy, you don’t have to hover over it and cleanup’s a breeze (if you use Jake’s method). There are about a hundred different ways people say to do it, but this is the one I favor: Line a half-sheet tray (or a cookie sheet, if that’s all you got) with tinfoil (Jake’s cleanup tip). Then I put the bacon strips on that, just barely overlapping (keep them completely separate if you want them crunchier) and top them with fresh cracked pepper (optional, of course, but that’s how I like them).

Again, everybody does it different, but I put them in a COLD oven, turn the oven on 400 degrees F. and set the timer for 20 minutes (cooking time varies widely due to both the thickness of the bacon you’re using and how fast your personal oven heats up).

When the timer goes off, I check it. Now, I use a gas stove (which heats up fast) but thick bacon. So, it usually takes another five minutes or so until the bacon is just right for me.

Then I pull the tray from the oven and immediately transfer the bacon to another half-sheet tray lined with paper towels to drain. DO NOT leave the bacon in the first pan, as the combination of the hot pan and the hot grease will continue to cook the bacon and it will end up either over-crispy or, worse yet, burnt!

Now, I pour off any grease into a coffee cup and save it in the fridge for cooking. Jake (unless he’s changed) lets it just cool and solidify on the tinfoil and disposes of it. Either way, when the tinfoil is cool, you just bunch it up and throw it away. No muss, no fuss!

I toasted two slices of Pepperidge Farm sourdough bread (the only kind I buy, usually). I smeared them with mayonnaise and put on some Romaine lettuce (just because that’s the kind I had) and slices of the fresh cut home-grown tomato. I salted that and then added two slices of bacon, each broken in half). I think its easier and less messy to eat if you don’t cut it, so I didn’t.

Man, that was good! It was so good, in fact, I immediately made myself another one. I ate some of the cucumber salad for my side dish, BTW, and it was quite tasty, too (and, no, I didn’t add any more salt).

I topped off my meal with a cup of coffee and watched TV for a while. Then I went out and put the rest of the bacon in a baggie and in the fridge and washed the two half-sheet trays (thanks to the tinfoil, I didn’t have to scrub them) and the few utensils I used.

I fell asleep watching TV, but when I woke up for a bathroom break, I put the bed flat, turned off the light and TV and then went to sleep for real.