Glad to see I’m not eating up all your time on the sausagemaking forum! Mainly I just wanted to pop over to your website and tell you how much I’m learning from our discussions and how glad I am I discovered the forum.

I smoked two rashers of bacon and two whole chickens yesterday (glazed with bourbon and sugar and coated with black pepper. I’ve got another two pieces of bacon and two more chickens to do today (smoked over cherry wood and glazed with cherry brandy). And then a bacon explosion on Sunday to take to a Superbowl party. Whew!

Did you hunt the partridge?

Funny you should mention the mushrooms, as I had the same idea of substituting the bacon in the middle with grilled portobellos. In the end, I rendered some bacon and then cooked down 3 pounds of onions in the fat, with more bourbon and brown sugar, and made that the center of the bacon explosion. Pretty tasty, but a little definitely goes a long way.

I’m working on a new version now, that will have a stuffed pork tenderloin at the center . . .