In addition to the recent forays into duck confit and duck prosciutto, charcuterie mania has taken me down the bacon path as well. While I have a love/love relationship with pork in all of its wonderful and manifold forms, bacon is where the world slows down, my toes curl, and my eyes roll back into my happy place.  The combination of salt, fried crispy fat, and an unctuousness that heralds a heart attack, bacon was the perfect thing to try and make successfully at Chez DL.

Most bacon is smoked.  So-called fresh bacon, however, is only the product of a salt cure and some time.  It starts wth a good fatty piece of pork belly  (is there any other kind?  Alas, yes. Eschew those).  Pork belly is all the rage now among the jet-set of cooking, and prices are beginning to edge up on this traditionally ignored, and perhaps even slightly disdainfully considered, piece of the pig.  Most Asian and Hispanic markets have always had these sorts of pig bits, and prices there are about where they’ve always been.  Cheap.

Once rubbed with a cure of kosher salt, pink salt, and  some sugar, the bacon goes in the fridge for a week.  After that, you’ve got bacon.  For a specialty application, however, like spaghetti carbonara, I left it in to cure for substantially longer.  Since I was going to dice it, and toss with semolina pasta, I was looking for a stronger and deeper salting of the meat.

Coming out of the cure, the bacon was firm, and sliced easily.  Pork is so popular because of its ability to soak up flavors while still maintaining its own distinct character.  The cure had clearly worked its way all the way through the pork belly.  The result was some gorgeous looking tastiness.

As with so many other things, a cast iron skillet is the way to go with this.  The thickness of the bacon requires that you slowly render the fat; too fast and you’ll lose that combination of soft and salty that you want.  Bad.

Cooking away, the bacon shrinks some (but not a lot), and once it is evenly (heavenly) brown and the fat has crisped, it’s ready to go.  I took it out, drained it, and then cut it into thin slices before tossing it with raw egg, cream, crushed black and red pepper, and parmigiano in a bowl of hot spaghetti.

Best. Bacon. Ever.

There is something wonderful and decadent about cooking for friends on a Saturday night. While the rest of the world is out standing in line, or waiting impatiently for their bread and water to show up, you can relax around a busy, much smaller kitchen, drinking perfectly appropriately priced wine, and tasting as you go. What is not to love?

A couple of weekends ago I spent the better half of a day out doing all of those end-of-summer tasks that one finds impossible to ignore anymore. After cutting grass, planting a couple thousand little bulbs, picking pieces of backed-over driveway lighting (circa July) out of the gully that used to be a nice landscaped water feature, and enthusiastically trying to kill off the remaining 31 mosquitoes in the back yard, I turned to dinner.

It felt—in my bones—like a rotisserie kind of night, and I’d been waiting for an opportunity to do babi guling. Babi guling is one of those dishes that you just know on hearing about that you’d be willing to give up a wee bit of your soul for a long, uninterrupted evening of rolling around in the sand with a big hunk of pork. Traditionally served during the religious holidays of Galungan and Kuninga, babi guling is a suckling pig stuffed with herbs and spices, and then slowly roasted over a fire of corn husks. The resultant buttery meat and very crispy skin, while undoubtedly offensive to any honest pig-pikin North Carolina pit master, is legendary.

Having a certain dearth of suckling pigs, or an abundance of corn husks, or frankly a good holiday, my version used a pork loin, which while clearly lacking the necessary skin to ever be very crispy, had the distinct advantage after a day of being outside not cooking babi guling, of being both much easier to get, and cooking in under 12 hours. The pork loin itself is not really all that exciting. If you close your eyes and think about a pork loin, you’ll have a pretty accurate picture of what I was dealing with. The spice paste, known to Balinese everywhere as bumbu, is where the babi guling steps up to its porcine brethren, clears its throat, and says, “excuse me, but I’m just going to pop out and total f with the way people think about little four-legged, short-snouted, curly-tailed swine.”

The babi guling bumbu (or at least the one I made, and I generally stay in the same hemisphere of interpretation), is made from shallots (this is not strictly traditional), thai chilies, chopped ginger, garlic, turmeric, some galangal, lots of lemongrass, some cilantro, black pepper, lime juice, and brown sugar. A cook, well-steeped in the appropriate culinary lore of Indonesia, would have worked this mixture over in a big mortar with pestle until it was the smoothness of melted chocolate. I added a bit of oil, threw everything into the food processor, whirled it until I had the smoothness of chocolate, and wiggled my eyebrows at my relieved looking mortar. I then sauteed the mixture until it smelled like heaven and took on a sheen, stuffed the pork loin with it, tied everything tight, rubbed the loin with the remaining bumbu, and then ran a rotisserie stake through the middle.

A couple of hours later I paraded the fragrant and deeply caramelized roast through the appropriately cooing throng on the way from grill to platter. After 15 minutes of doing nothing but trying to undertake polite conversation while the deep and deeply seductive aroma of the pork washed over us, we convened in a manner that had a small furry desert creature been watching would have been disturbingly reminiscent of a pack of jackals happening upon a slightly dazed and decidedly plump elephant. With our third (or fourth) bottle of wine, we settled into an evening of babi guling, rice, and some really nice caviar stuffed new potatoes (another entry altogether).

Take a 3 lbs (or so) pork shoulder roast (or pork loin) and cut a long, deep slice from end to end; blend shallots, chilies, ginger, garlic, turmeric, lemon grass, galanga, cilantro, black pepper, lime juice, salt, brown sugar, and enough vegetable oil to make a nice paste; stuff the pork, tie it, and stick it on the rotisserie for about an hour and a half to two hours. Let sit for 10-15 minutes (if possible) before slicing and eating. Serve with rice, some sambal, and wine or beer.

The original plan was to dive the Dominican Republic. A fair and good plan for the onslaught of fallish weather. But, fate and a sudden, but completely uncontrollable urge to eat jamon serrano and anything remotely both porcine and asado, has led to a change of plans. At the end of the month, we’re off to Madrid for ten days. The plan is very, very simple: 1. eat, 2. drink, 3. revel (in Spain, in painting, in architecture, in markets), 4. sleep, 5. repeat.

Yes, there will be pictures, there will be wild pronouncements of undying love for the city’s markets, completely rational and calm assurances that I’m never returning to Northern Virginia, and Every. Single. Euro. I have will be spent on the city’s splendid eats and drink.

Any suggestions?