Todd Stadler's blog

Bachoconlate chip cookies

After seeing a recipe for bacon chocolate chip cookies floating around the Internet (notably at my friend Sarah's blog), I knew I had to make them. No, I knew I was destined to make them.

After all, what is my favorite type of cookie? Chocolate chip. Too many other cookies try too hard — 16 different stir-in ingredients plus two glazes and a dusting of ... come on, you're still nowhere near as tasty as a beautiful (that is to say, slightly underbaked) chocolate chip cookie! You cannot improve on perfection!

Unless ... Unless, that is, you add my favorite food, bacon. Bacon makes everything better! (Yes, I know, from a purely poetic vantage, cheddar makes everything better because it rhymes, or maybe butter makes everything better because it's only one letter different, but these cookies do not lack for butter, and bacon still gives a nice bit of alliteration, so please put down your copy of Leaves of Grass and join us back in the world of tasty food, okay? Thanks.)

Like I said, bacon makes everything better. That is my hypothesis, and I had yet to find any contrary data, but this recipe for bacon in a cookie would certainly put it to the test.

First, a word to those of you still staring glassy-eyed at the screen, quietly muttering "He didn't ... ew!" Please! Have you ever had bacon with your pancakes? (If you answered no, stop reading now. No, seriously ... just stop.) Have you ever had chocolate chip pancakes? How about ... bacon with chocolate chip pancakes? And sweet, sweet maple syrup? Then don't pretend that you think my cookies are gross.

You're getting hung up on context: "Meat should not go in cookies!" Fine, it's a breakfast item. A breakfast item called, um ... galette de morceau de chocolat et lard. See, doesn't that sound better? (No? You're hung up on the fact that the French for bacon is lard, aren't you? You're hopeless.) But seriously, it's got bacon and eggs in it. And butter and flour. Sounds like breakfast to me!

Moving on! I made the cookies, more or less following the aforementioned recipe, but with a few alterations, noted below:

The original recipe called for a maple glaze, but I'm sorry, I can't stomach maple glaze. If you're really jonesing for maple flavor, follow the recipe above and drizzle pure maple syrup over the top. But maple glaze? Might as well coat it in vomit. Your mileage may vary.

Now, a note on bacon bits. It goes without saying that I didn't use fake bacon bits (a.k.a., obviously, fakon bits) — cookies and defatted soy flour simply do not mix! But given my mildly obsessive personality (hello, I'm making bacon chocolate chip cookies here!), I felt it would be cheating to buy canned bacon bits.

The original recipe said that you'd need about two pounds of bacon to make the two cups of bits that the recipe calls for. So I went out and got two pounds of New Seasons' finest bacon — applewood smoked (no pepper, duh), thick-cut, the champagne of bacon. Or, if you will, the bacon of bacon.

And I think that was a mistake. First of all, it was, um, expensive. Gah! Let us not speak of the price. Suffice to say that I briefly doubted my commitment to Sparkle Motion bacon. But then I remembered what I was dealing with here: namely, bacon. So I bought it anyhow.

But more to the point, the bacon was too thick to get crispy enough. Now if I were having it on the side of a breakfast plate, I'd say the bacon was perfect — meaty, salty, chewy, with just enough crisp.

But in a cookie, "meaty" and "chewy" is kind of weird (I know, one of you is thinking, "But bacon in cookies is weird!", but didn't I ask you to stop reading already?). What I wanted the bacon in the cookies to be was, above all (well, after "bacony"), crisp. I could have done that better by buying a package of thin-cut bacon.

Also, at least with thick-cut bacon, two pounds makes more than two cups of bits! Not that I'm complaining — leftover bacon isn't left over very long in our house.

So, fourteen paragraphs and one recipe in, and I still haven't told you how they turned out. I'm sure you're on tenterhooks. ("Tenter-what"? "Shh, he's about to tell us how the cookies were.")

Fig. A: The only cookies at the cookie swap with a "Non-vegetarian!" warning label

They were ... fine. Honestly, given that there were equal amounts of bacon and chocolate chips, I felt the cookies were far more chocolatey than bacony. Which was odd. "Bacon makes everything better", right? Not "bacon makes everything slightly different but about as good".

Like I said, I feel that thinner, crispier bacon would have increased the bacon flavor while decreasing the odd meaty chewiness. But still, the bacon did add a nice bit of salt, and what bacon flavor there was melded nicely with the almond extract.

And even if the flavor wasn't revolutionary, the mere existence of the cookies sent some of my nerdier friends into fits of euphoria. So that's nice.

Washing Machine Stadler

Wow, after getting into the whole Twitter thing, I'm finding it's really hard to fire up the ol' blog editor and actually write something over 140 characters. Wait, didn't my last entry start this way? Well, as they say, thoughts are fleeting, but a blog is an online journal ordered chronologically.

With that in mind, can I ask what's up with this?

I mean, I know it's a spam site, a giant link farm designed to give the impression of actually being a home electronics site (thus the catchy domain name homeelectr.info, which I like to pronounce "home electrinfo", or at least claim that I would) while really only serving to up the search engine rank of whoever paid it to link to them (at least until Google gets wise and adjusts its algorithm or bans them).

What I don't get is what it has to do with my last name. There is not, as far as I can tell, a washing machine made by a company named Stadler, nor is there a particular machine model named Stadler.

Best I can tell, it has something to do with an entry on my blog, linked to from that spam site, in which I came up with puns about a bicycle-powered washing machine. Which, somehow, led to my last name being [Update: the latter part of this sentence got truncated when I first posted this; thus, Jarrett's comment below] associated with washing machines, not that that makes sense.

Sure, that site was probably generated by some Web-surfing robot, so it doesn't have to make sense, but find it troubling nonetheless. Every bit as troubling as the vision I just had of robots literally surfing.

And yet, I feel that "Washing Machine" Stadler would be a great nickname. I can't explain it — just a gut feeling.

For those of you who were wondering if I found out about that site by vainly Googling for my own name, the answer is no. No, I set up a Google Alert to do the vain searching for me. And it just emailed me about this search result today.

So I've hired some Web-surfing robots to tell me every time they find my name, and they told me they found my name on a site generated by Web-surfing robots. Yeah, that seems about right.

Notes from Tuesday

You can tell how sluggish I am about blogging when even a short, quotidian entry like this one gets pushed out three days from when the events it describes occurred. Sigh. But at least you get an introductory paragraph topped with self-deprecation. So it's not all negatives.

Anyhow, a group of us went to the Teardrop Lounge* Tuesday night, just because we so rarely get out during the week.

The Teardrop is in Portland's Pearl District, which, being a high-falutin' area, tends to give me the heebie-jeebies. Or so I like to pretend. It's not that I don't appreciate the several quadrillion fancy condos (or "rip-offs") interspersed with fancy shopping opportunities (or "shopportunities" — okay, I've never used that term), it's more that I can't afford to go there very often.

Anyhow, the Teardrop has a reputation for well-crafted cocktails that actually justify their price tag, so I was curious. But mainly it was about the friends.

We seemed quite lucky to get a large horseshoe-shaped booth in the back, given that there was also some sort of media shindig at the same time in the Teardrop. But maybe it wasn't packed at happy hour because it's, well, ugly. I understand the appeal of the stark, modern look, but this wasn't it. It was the sort of decor that made me want to stare intensely at the menu — maybe that's the point.

Thankfully, the menu required lots of staring, full as it was of long lists of ingredients, many of them obscure, a few of them possibly completely made-up. "Germain robin alembic brandy"? "Meyer-lemon-sake gastrique"? "Pineau de charentes"? And those are all from one drink! (The drink, the Hard Sell, also includes Cynar, which I am familiar with and even own a bottle for some reason; it's an artichoke-derived liquor, and as such pretty darn weird.)

Anyhow, we all seemed to enjoy our drinks, which, as our waiter reminded us several times, were in the "pre-Prohibition" style. Frankly, that phrase holds no deep meaning for me. They ... contain alcohol? Each drink is served with the waiter saying, "Here you go, old sport"? I don't know.

But if that was a bit odd, what was even odder was hearing the waiter continually ask people at our table, "What is your flavor profile?" Someone would show hesitation in choosing a drink, and he'd ask it: "What is your flavor profile?" Um ... Romanesque? Tasty? Awesome? It's just fine, thank you? Isn't flavor profiling illegal?

Oh, fine, I get what he was asking, but it seems like a really tortured/precious way to ask people what other drinks or flavors they like. I wouldn't complain if the question had worked, but instead it only generated further confusion, punctuated by uncomfortable chair-shifting, and concluded with a finger stabbing at the menu and "I'll just have this one."

One drawback to sitting in the horseshoe-shaped booth was that there were no chairs to hang our coats and bags on. So we piled them on top of the booth's ledge. In a posher place, this would have been incredibly gauche of us, but frankly, our mass of winter jackets served to obscure some ugly glass vases, so I felt no compunction.

That would have been all well and good, but at some point a lady came along who apparently thought that our pile was the official place to plop one's coat, even though she wasn't sitting with us — say what you will about our manners, we did demonstrate leadership!

Unfortunately, she was rather clumsy (eh ... drunk), and managed to break most of the glass vases on the ledge. Tada! As an encore, she also managed to land her jacket on top of one of the very hot halogen lamps set into the booth ledge — something we noticed only after they'd cleaned up all the glass: "Do you smell popcorn"?

But the single thing that probably compelled me to write this all down for you was when my friend Kim remembered that I'd gone to Rice (wait for it ...), and noted that her cousin had also gone to Rice (wait ...), probably even my year (get ready ...), and did I possibly know Eric Horler? (Can you feel the suspense?)

Criminy. Of course I know Eric Horler! (Denouement!) He was in my college (that is, dorm), Lovett, and I particularly hung around with him my freshman year. So by my estimation, the earth lost several inches of diameter with that conversation.

Anyhow, I didn't say it'd be an interesting story.

*A side note on the Teardop's Web site: it's horrible. First, you can't find it by Googling, because the clever lads have made the entire site out of Flash, and search engines get no text to analyze. Clever. But I found it anyhow. Plus, you have to watch the animation every time you reload the page, and it's not even good animation. And it uses this really annoying display font everywhere that looks like the Web site got smeared with water. Clearly, the Teardrop people are putting way more time into their cocktails than their presence, either online or in real life. Okay, I'm done now.