Chocolate ice cream with candied bacon bits (and no ice cream maker)

Chocolate ice cream with candied bacon bits

Believe it or not, this is my 200th post. Yowza.

That's 200 things I've cooked and shared with you ... at least 200 photos -- not all good, but still ... and 200 (well, probably 5000) smart-assed comments about food -- not all good, but still.

So what better way to celebrate than with ice cream? With candied bacon in it.

Yes, my friends, candied bacon. As if bacon alone wasn't enough.

(I think Job 1 this weekend is to re-make the bacon oatmeal cookies with candied bacon, don't you agree?)

Before we get too far down the candied bacon road, let me emphasize that this post is really about making ice cream without an ice cream machine. Really, it is.

For a while now, I've been debating about whether or not I need an ice cream maker. On the pro side: ice cream -- yummy goodness. On the con side: ice cream -- yummy fatness. We don't really need a whole lot more yummy fatness around here.

I am torn.

Baked bacon: tip and technique

Bacon! The photo is a little too pink but you get the idea.

In my world, everything is better with some crumbled bacon.

And I have the blessing of Mark Bittman, so I'm justified.

In his Food Matters Cookbook, Bittman presents many of the recipes in their vegetarian form but also offers suggestions for protein add-ins if, like Mr. Ninj, dinner isn't dinner without some meat -- it's just lunch. And the recommended add-in, more often than not, is bacon. (I heart Bittman, don't you?)

So imagine my joy when I stumbled across a technique in a recent issue of Cooking Light for baked bacon. It ... is ... WICKED!

Here's how you do it:

A very ninja xmas: some handy kitchen tools

Happy holidays from The Ninja and The King!

Santa was quite good to the Ninj this year.

Let me start out by saying I'm not trying to push you into buying any products and I'm certainly not being paid by the manufacturers to do so (I wish!!); I just received some neat kitchen gadgets for xmas that I thought you also might find cool and/or helpful.

1. Scraping beater blade for Kitchen Aid stand mixer:
   
   Don't you hate that there's always a wee little bit of ingredient that doesn't quite get incorporated at the very bottom or on the sides of the stand mixer, once you think you're done mixing? (I can see you, nodding your head wildly in agreement) So you always have to do a final mix with a spatula anyway? Well, this little bad boy solves that problem. It has rubbery, spatula-like sides and a tip that incorporate every last bit of your ingredients automatically. I love this, and I love that it's inexpensive, too!
2. Adjustable-thickness rolling pin:
   
   This is a superfluous gadget, I admit, but I love a clever idea when I see one. This is a regular old rolling pin, with handy size markings on the barrel so that you can use it and not a nasty, 20-year-old grade-school ruler (ahem) to see when your dough has achieved 10-inch perfection, or whatever your recipe calls for. However, here's the neato gadgety part: it has three interchangeable side rings that ensure consistent thickness of your dough as well! Clever, clever, clever! However, be forewarned: do not transport this in your airline carry-on bag because it apparently, according to the nice BWI TSA agent, looks a lot like a pipe bomb in the xray machine (ahem).
3. Perfect Portions nutrition scale:
   
   Essentially, this is a small, sleek digital food scale, capable of displaying amounts in grams or ounces, with a handy zeroing feature (to account for the weight of whatever container you may be using) -- far snazzier and more accurate than the analog, looks straight-from-the-1950s-butcher-shop hulking garage model that I confiscated from ... well, frankly, the garage a few years ago. But this beauty can also give you portion-sized nutritional information! It comes with a extensive guide that lists every kind of natural (e.g., apple, raw without skin) and pre-packaged (e.g., Campbell's Chunky Chicken Corn Chowder) food option you can think of -- you just put your food on the scale, enter the corresponding code and it displays the nutritional information in the same format that you see it on product packaging. I think this is going to be very handy, come Detox January (more on that next week, dear reader).

What did Santa add to your kitchen collection this year?