Full Coverage BLT Sandwich Solutions

Things I love about summer: longer days, warm weather, and BLT sandwiches made with garden fresh tomatoes.

The garden tomatoes aren't rolling in yet, but the sweet corn is, so I'm ready for BLT season!  The ultimate high is biting into a BLT and having the perfect amount of bacon, lettuce, tomato, and mayo.  The worst: getting to the end of the sandwich and only having lettuce and bread left.

Here's how to get every bite of your BLT full of bacon and tomato.  It's so simple--you'll be surprised you didn't think of it yourself!

The full coverage BLT sandwich.

To make your full coverage BLT, you'll need three large strips of butcher bacon, sliced in half to yield six smaller pieces.  Use the thick cut butcher kind--you'll never go back to the standard strips!  Place the three strips side by side.  Then weave the remaining three strips to create a lattice work. 

 Bacon lattice work, ready to be cooked.

To cook the bacon square, I baked in the oven on a foil lined pan for about twenty minutes at 425.  Adjust based on the thickness of your bacon.  Thin bacon will cook much faster.  The thickest of butcher slices may take more time.

While your bacon is baking, slice your tomato, toast the bread, and wash and dry the lettuce.  Assemble your sandwich so all you need is the bacon.  If you really love tomato, cut your tomato into smaller pieces and stick them in place in the mayo.  This will guarantee tomato in every bite.

Tomato lover's BLT: use the mayo to glue tomato pieces in place.  This will ensure tomato in every bite in a way that sliced tomato does not.

The finished product: a full coverage BLT sandwich.

Home to Remove Silk from Corn...It's Never Been Easier!

Tired of picking silk out of your corn on the cob?  No toothbrush to use the supposed kitchen hack of scrubbing the silk away?  Do it the easy way.

Step 1: Cut the end (without the silk) off the cob.  You'll want to see the cob on the end, not husk.  If you see husk, cut off a little more.

Step 2: Microwave the corn for 2 minutes and 30 seconds on full power.

Step 3: Grasp corn with a towel (it'll be hot!)  Squeeze from the silk end and the corn will slide out.  All of the silk will stick to the inside of the husk!

Your summer just got a lot easier!

How to Peel Hard Boiled Eggs...It's Never Been Easier!

Right before Easter, I saw a post on Huffington Post about how to perfectly peel a hard boiled egg.  The video showed the egg being shaken in a glass of water.

Anytime I see a kitchen hack, I'm skeptical.  So many of them simply don't work.  Is your spaghetti water foaming too much and boiling over?  Don't put a wooden spoon on top of the pot.  It doesn't work.  Do your hands smell of onion after slicing one?  Don't touch them to a stainless sink.  They'll still be smelly.  You get the idea.

I did try this shortcut though because with Easter coming, I knew I'd need to peel eggs for deviling.  I wanted my job to be as easy as possible.  To start, I hard boiled the oldest eggs in my refrigerator.  Fresh eggs are harder to peel.

After the eggs were hard boiled and cooled enough to handle, I put one in a lidded container with about an inch of water.  Sure enough, I shook it vigorously and the shell popped right off in the water.

Peeling hard boiled eggs has never been easier!  Here's my egg popping right out of its shell.

I repeated the process with three eggs in the container.  The shells cracked and came off in one piece when I peeled at them.  They were not floating loosely in the water.  Of all the eggs I peeled using this method, I only found any shell on one egg.  A shard of shell had stuck into the egg white.  If I had not inspected each egg, I would not have noticed but it would've been an unpleasant surprise to whoever ate the deviled egg later.

Bottom line: this technique works!  Don't crowd the eggs in a container.  They need to be able to shift freely.  Inspect the eggs after to make sure no shards stick into the eggs.  Biting into egg shell is the worst.