Weekend Cooking and Cookbook Countdown

I had a great weekend.  I did nothing.  Nothing except read and cook.

It was perfect.

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, quotations, photographs. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend.

This is what I bought at the market yesterday:

Lots of them.

Yes, we are among all those people who get overly excited when 

Hatch Chilies are ready to roast!

This post isn't so much about what I made with the chilies tho.... it's about what I did with the bacon.

I swizzled it.

As you know, every weekend Bethfish Reads hosts Weekend Cooking, and I like to participate.  Yesterday morning she posted about the same cookbook I was going to.  That's so weird!

Really weird, because it's happened before here.

It takes so little to amuse me----and this does. 

This is the cookbook she reviewed and this the one I made something from. Bacon Nation by  Peter Kaminsky and Marie Rama.  

I made bacon swizzle sticks. To go in the Sunday morning Bloody Mary's, of course.

I thought they would be fun.  And they were.  Fun to eat.  And lay beside your Bloody Mary, but if you actually swizzled with it, it became a wet piece of bacon...and that's never good.

They were easy to do and I would do it again.  It's kind of a fun thing.

(this cookbook has lots of good recipes in it. And like Bethfish says, it's not loaded with too much bacon.  Bacon is sometimes just a small ingredient.)

This is how you make a bacon swizzle stick:

take a piece of bacon and twist the ends until and then roll that up in a paper towel. Microwave on high for 1-3 minutes, depending on your microwave.

And there you have it.  Crispy bacon swizzle sticks.

Bacon Nation makes cookbook #60 in my own personal Cookbook Countdown!

AND THEN.... I used some Hatch Chilies!

I stuffed them with bacon and cheese and an egg.

I found this recipe for  Hatch chili Pepper Jack, Bacon and Eggs  on 

Cooking the Weekends Blog

Her's look so much prettier than mine. 

I also used cheddar cheese and not pepper jack.  Just because i felt like it.

Mine, although not as nice looking tasted GREAT!

I will have to cook them longer than 15 minutes next time, tho as my eggs were a bit runny.  I guess you just have to play around with it some. 

It was really good!

Recipe

8 Hatch chile peppers, roasted and peeled -- here's how

6 strips applewood smoked bacon

1/2 cup thinly sliced brown onion

1-1/4 cup grated pepper jack cheese

8 eggs

Sea salt and freshly cracked black pepper

1. Roast and peel the peppers -- here's how to roast Hatch chiles. Set aside.
2. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F and place a paper towel on a large plate and set it aside.
3. In a large oven proof skillet (one that will ultimately fit 8 opened Hatch chiles quite snugly), cook the bacon over medium heat until it's crisp, about 3 minutes per side. Remove the bacon from the pan and place it on the paper towel-covered plate to let the grease drain.
4. Pour off about half of the bacon grease (I pour it into a foil lined, small bowl), and keep the rest in the pan.
5. Add the onions to the pan, and over medium-high heat, cook until they are nicely browned, about 4 minutes. Put the browned onions in a small bowl, keeping any remaining bacon grease in the pan. Set aside.
6. Carefully, using a small paring knife or your fingers, make a slit in each of the peppers to open them, keeping the stem intact and the pepper whole, gently remove all of the seeds. Place the peppers, open side up in the pan.
7. Sprinkle each pepper with a thin layer of the cheese (you'll need about half of it remaining for the tops).
8. Break the bacon into smaller pieces and add a layer to each pepper, on top of the cheese.
9. Evenly distribute the onion on the bacon.
10. Crack an egg into each pepper, directly on top of the onion and bacon. You might need to gently hold the edges of the peppers up, to capture the whites as they run out of the shell -- it's fine if some runs out into the pan. (This is why the peppers should be a rather tight fit int he pan.)
11. Sprinkle each one with salt and pepper and evenly distribute the remaining cheese on top, on the sides of the yolks.
12. Place the pan in the 375 degree F preheated oven just until the eggs are cooked, about 15 minutes.
13. Let them cool in the pan for about 5 minutes and serve!