Desserts # 60 Chocolate Covered Bacon

 

One day I was talking to a man that had been a vegetarian for over forty years and I asked him why he was a vegetarian. He told me that he started as a vegetarian due to financial necessity in college. Over the years, it had progressed to more of a philosophical reasoning. Then he told me that he (as well as most of the other vegetarians that he knows)is only tempted by one thing: bacon.

101 Desserts #76 Dutch Letters

I had never thought of Dutch Letters as a regional food until I started to looking for some recipes to make it myself. As it turns out, they aren't regional; they are an Iowan food that has been imported from Holland. From those of you that have never had one of these, I am truly sorry. These are one of my top five foods of all time. I would rather have a bad Dutch Letter over nearly any other pastry.

Desserts: #74 Churros

Churros are a deep fried pastry that I imagine eating at a Mexican carnival. In fact, I associate is as a general Latino dessert. There are conflicting origin stories to this delectable and neither are from South America. One story claims that the churro was invented by Spanish shepards as an easy food to make over an open fire in the mountains. Another claim that the Portuguese brought the food to the west by adapting a similar one from the Chinese. I have lived in the Midwest my whole life and while I am familiar with fairs (Iowa has one of the nation's largest state fairs) and their food, churros haven't brought their dominance this far north. Regardless of where these pastries came from, they are

Desserts: #65 Pocky

Pocky is a Japanese snack that was created in 1966. It is made of a thing pretzel-like stick that has been dipped in a flavor. The three most common flavors are Chocolate, Strawberry and Almond. So, those are the three that I chose.  Pocky is an onomatopoetic word that is named for the sound that is made when it is bitten.