Hot Dogs

So at work, instead of working, we were watching some Man v Food, the Tucson episode. In it he tried this hot dog that was wrapped in bacon and covered with a ton of things. I can't even remember what all was on there. Jalapeño sauce, peppers, onions, mayonnaise, maybe some other stuff. But this inspired us and we set out to make our own.

I started with just some Ballpark Franks and wrapped them in Oscar Mayer Hearty Thick Cut Bacon. Tossed those into a frying pan with some butter. I also diced up some green pepper and onion and put that into a second pan and did what I thought was sautéing, but apparently was just pan frying. I don't know, I don't really know how to cook. This is just me faking it.

So I need some rolls for this, something a little bigger than standard hot dog rolls. At the advice of a coworker I went with some Wegmans Italian Sub Rolls, which I think worked quite nicely. Though in the future I'll try and find longer hot dogs to better fill the length of the bun.

As you can see, there was some extra bun compared to the hot dog, but it still turned out well. From here I just put on a slice of cheddar cheese so that it completely covered the hot dog and put them into the oven on broil for a few minutes, just long enough to melt the cheddar. Then I added some Picante Pepper Mustard I have that is delicious and covered the whole thing with the peppers and onions.

The meal was delicious. And I feel that I learned something, cooking wise, from doing it. At least getting the experience, which is half of what I'm after. The other half being a delicious meal. I was worried about the wrapping the hot dogs in bacon, and how to cook that but it worked out pretty well. I kept turning them over trying to get all sides done evenly. The only problem was that one of them came kind of unwrapped. If you noticed that I only had one of them pictured for the pre-cheese shot that's because the other one looked less like a bacon wrapped hotdog and more like a hot dog next to a piece of curled bacon that's partly overlaying it. Which is an awkward picture caption, so I went with the better looking one. The peppers and onions turned out well, I'm going to have to do that again for other dishes in the future. I'm getting much better with dicing vegetables, not quite as fast as the guys on TV, but I can at least keep the knife in constant motion while moving the vegetable. No more pausing every three slices or so to reposition everything.