Easy Bacon Bits

I love real bacon bits in salads or scrambled eggs but making them is a chore - all that frying and cleaning up the overspray for a few strips of bacon. Recently, however, I discovered an easy, abundant source of bacon bits for those of you who live in the Bay area.

Here's what you do. Drive to your nearest Barney's gourmet hamburger palace, sit down, and order their B.L.T. sandwich and a mocha milk shake. Don't forget the mocha shake - it's crucial to the plan.

While awaiting your sandwich, make goo-goo eyes at your Beloved across the table while you sip your mocha shake, which will have arrived well before your sandwich. Barney's mocha shakes are killer, made with real ice cream, real chocolate sauce and real coffee, served in a very tall glass with a wide-bore straw (that's still not wide enough to allow you to suck up such a thick shake) and alongside the other half of your shake in the metal blender container with a long spoon (very helpful!).

If you have followed directions carefully, by the time your sandwich arrives you will be too full of the mocha shake to eat another bite of anything. Now, ask for a box in which to transport your sandwich (which, parenthetically, is 'way too thick to bite, anyway, and too awkward to eat with a knife and fork) home. Once you get home, take apart the sandwich and pick out all the bacon, putting it into a separate baggie that you will keep in the fridge. On my sandwich, there was fully 3/4 of cup of bacon and perhaps a tad more.

Voila! a boatload of bacon to be chopped in a trice for your next omelet or salad! Nothing could be easier! And you got an unbelievably good mocha shake in the process, a bonus.

Mocha Shake

On a recent Sunday brunch outing with our pal Sari, we drove to Point Reyes Station, a fun and funky little town in west Marin, to enjoy the Station House Cafe's version. The day was brightly sunny, the drive out is lovely and the food was tasty, especially this mocha milk shake.

Frequent Zoomie Station readers will know that I adore mocha and am usually on the lookout for mocha anything. I hit the jackpot on this occasion - a friendly and funny waitress who brought an espresso shake drizzled down the inside of the glass with chocolate syrup.

You can sell my clothes, I died and went to heaven.