A rant

My friend took a joke to its logical extreme the other day. Working from the premise "bacon makes everything taste better," he decided to test this hypothesis, up to and including putting bacon on ice cream. His report was "it doesn't make it better, but it didn't really make it worse."

Ha ha. Except, on the Next Iron Chef the other day, one of the chefs MAKES a bacon ice cream. And the judges find it UNORIGINAL. The quote from one of the judges was something like--make sure you read this with the proper tone of elitist disdain--"This isn't the first time we've had a bacon gelato, you know."

On the one hand, how pretentious can you get? But, on the other hand, a statement like this makes me start to second-guess my tastes. I'd love to have had the chance to try some bacon ice cream, but where I live these days, the innovation in going out to eat is severely limited. Even if I did live in a more cosmopolitan metropolis, I'd still be limited by what I can afford.

I really do feel like an uncultured hick some days. Never been abroad. Never been to New York. Never been to LA. When I went to Chicago, the closest city of any real culinary chops, I went to the fondue place (and I'll defend that decision to the day I die, but it's not terribly innovative).