Bacon Tongs

  Jan had to work last Friday evening, so it was left up to me to come up with dinner for the two of us. As I've mentioned before, I'm a terrific cook. There may not be a whole range of things I'm good at, but I can certainly cook good when I have to cook. I was a little tired, so I looked in the fridge to see what my options were. Actually, they were somewhat limited. Hmmm... a Costco sized jar of dill pickles, a three pound can of Crisco, a bottle of all natural, raw, unfiltered organic apple cider vinegar- I didn't buy that stuff, a friend gave it to us to try- some wilted carrots, a few stalks of limp celery, assorted jars of condiments in various stages of fullness, a half head of lettuce with the end all brown and some bacon. On the counter I had a tomato and an onion. Wellll... looks like I have the raw ingredients for a BLT, one of my favorite sandwiches. I started preparing the other ingredients and finally put the bacon in the frying pan. That's when the fun started. The aroma of frying bacon filled the house and the smoke started filling the kitchen, so before the smoke alarm began blaring, I turned on the overhead fan. One problem solved. I went to turn over the bacon and promptly got into a confrontation with it. I felt like I was in a sword fight, dancing around the stove, parrying, jabbing, trying to flip the pork belly delight before it could spatter me again with hot grease. Had I been thinking properly I would have worn my golden goggles and grabbed a pan lid to use as a shield like one of the Knights of the Round Table. I saw that the kitchen utensil I had, a pair of tongs, was literally, painfully too small to do battle with that bacon. Fortunately I was wearing a long sleeved shirt and after a few unsuccessful attempts at turning over my increasingly crispy, nitrate filled, salt cured, fatty meat I remembered the Ov Glove that was in the drawer and I donned it. It gave me the added protection that I needed against my belligerent dinner. Fortunately I happen to like really crispy bacon. I'm not real fond of carbon, but I do like pretty well cooked bacon. Which is a good thing, because it was. Frankly for a while there I was afraid to get close to the stove to turn it off. It was after this unpleasant ordeal that I realized that Tomco Industries should come out with Bacon Tongs. With Bacon Tongs, which would be about two feet long and have shields much like the ones that are on the handle of swords, you'd be able to safely grab any manner of fried, spattering, sputtering meat from even the hottest frying pan. Think about it. No more rushing in to try and turn the bacon before it was reduced to black marbles, no guessing at when the next volcanic eruption in the pan will occur, and you wouldn't need to put on a bee-keeping outfit just to cook your supper. I would think that just about everyone who likes bacon would love a pair of these Bacon Tongs. Those all natural folks who live in nudist colonies would probably flock to the stores to get a set of these tongs. After all, a lot more than your hands or arms would be in danger of getting burned. Guess I better get started on production.