Bread and Wine: Bacon Wrapped Dates

This was an exciting recipe to try and even more fun with the addition of a few friends at dinner tonight to try them out. I mean, anything's kind of great with bacon, right? It's true, and these were no exception.

Let's eat!

The Recipe: Bacon Wrapped Dates
Ingredients: Bacon, cream goat cheese, dried pitted dates.

If you're thinking, "That can't be right. Only three ingredients?" You'd be both wrong and right. It IS right and yes, only three ingredients to amazing (see "bacon" again). I drew up my chair to the kitchen table to make these this afternoon while watching Tidying Up (gah, what a great show!) and the kids napped. It took about 15 minutes to make these fancy-looking things.

I did make the mistake of thinking too hard and reasoning that "too much bacon" would create a hard shell around the soft dates and be too difficult too eat, so I skimped a little on Shauna's instructions and wrapped a few dates in 1/4 strips of bacon instead of half. A small but noticeable mistake. You NEED the whole half of bacon to cook around the date, otherwise, with a smaller piece, the fat melts and breaks away from the date, leaving essentially a cruelly bacon-flavored date without much bacon. As I told my husband, "What WAS I thinking? 'Too much bacon.' Philistine!"

The goat cheese is still a struggle for me, I just.don't.love.it. But buried in the bacon it was okay, and the texture was luxurious, like thick bacon truffles or something. My friends and I ate them like cookies, snacking on a few before supper then slipping more onto our plates and bowls at the supper. They are perfect served alongside the Magical White Bean soup!

The Chapter: Present Over Perfect
It's fitting to come to this chapter right now, and in thinking about it this week, this chapter symbolizes some things I've come to realize about myself through cooking and writing. It's this: That I don't have to be perfect to show up and take up space, and then a lot about not counting time or resources too precious to be used for something creative and not directly utilitarian.

Shauna writes about Christmas and her commitment to practicing presence and peace, versus perfectionism and stress.

"Let's be courageous in these days," she writes. "Let's choose love and rest and grace. Let's use our minutes and hours to create memories with the people we love instead of dragging them on one more errand or shushing them while we accomplish one more seemingly necessary thing" (170).

Cooking is so incredibly messy. So is even sharing what I cook. But I'm learning that cooking is actually a way I love to connect with people, messiness and all, so I'm trying to lean into that.

My husband is gone for work right now and the me and the kids were a little lonely today so I called up the wife of my husband's oldest friend and asked if we could come over for dinner. "I'M bringing dinner," I said.

Seriously, I had all this food I've made this week because #blogproject, and it would actually help me out.

I showed up with kids in pajamas to our friends' noisy home of six, with dogs running in and out the garage door, toddlers wailing and big kids busily shuffling through chores. It was loud, chaotic and messy, but loving and funny. We parents cracked each other up with grownup jokes and heaped food on our plates. The kids built with blocks and ran in circles around us. The dad got up and chased my kids around the kitchen island much to their ecstatic glee.

Oh man, it was loud and crazy, but so, so great.

In past years I would have stayed nicely, cleanly at home. Depressed, probably, and in tears, but clean and quiet. I'm learning that doesn't work for me any more.

Connecting with people even on loud, messy, cold Thursdays, is a means for memory making and relationship building, the good stuff of life. And what better way to be present, connecting, than over the table?