Brilliant … But Bouncy

The Bacon Was ALL Falling Through the Slats.

All of my concerns about Shane are unfounded.

I decided to bake bacon. My mother mentioned it to me in passing, and I thought, hey! that sounds easy!

“Do you have a cooling rack, like you would use to cool cookies?”

“Yes!” I said excitedly.

“You put that inside the baking pan, and the bacon goes on top. It’s really easy. You can find the instructions on the internet.”

I practically raced to the internet. I found an instructional article – complete with pictures – that couldn’t have been any easier.

I dug out my cooling rack, my baking sheet and a pound of bacon. I sprayed the cooling rack with non-stick cooking spray. I sprayed the pan with non-stick cooking spray, just for good measure. I pulled out the proper amount of bacon to fit the pan and lined it up with the thicker side on top for the first, thinner side on top for the second.

“Make sure not to overlap slices!” the article said.

The one on the end fell inside the little slats of the cookie sheet, and partially landed in the pan, which seemed problematic. I decided that my cookie rack wasn’t perfect, and just shoved that last slice of bacon around until it held tight on top of the cookie rack.

I set the temperature on the oven and put the bacon in, set the timer and waited.

Five minutes later, I looked at my creation. The bacon was all falling through the slats of the cookie sheet, swimming in the bacon grease below. Pieces of it were still clinging to the top of the cookie sheet, so the top chunks were getting crisp while the bottom chunks were getting grease-ridden and soggy.

I didn’t have one, single piece of bacon that looked like the picture.

Something had to be done – and fast – or we weren’t having baked bacon with our lunch. And it’s hard to make BLT’s without bacon. They would be sad “LT’s” – and who wants that?

So I whisked the pan quickly out of the oven, careful not to splatter the grease. I pulled out a paper towel and started plucking the strips out of the grease, desperately trying to balance the bacon and make it look like the picture. Nothing was working. It just kept falling through the slats, and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it.

I thought the slats were too wide. I thought the bacon was too thin. I thought, geez, I can’t cook anything right!

Then I realized: the slats only run one way.

In my situation, the slats ran vertically. So I put the bacon on the cooling rack vertically. I had aligned the bacon with the slats – which seemed logical, at the time.

But after seeing the disaster that I’d created, I realized that if the slats run vertically, then having the bacon sit horizontally would be far more logical. It might even keep the bacon on top of the rack, instead of letting it drop through the slats!

So I put all the bacon across the slats, horizontally, then plopped the pan back into the oven. Eventually, we ate baked bacon.

I couldn’t help but think about Shane, and the envelope, and the visual aids, and my concerns that there is really something misfiring in his brain.

If there is, it’s misfiring in my brain, too.