What are your snow day essentials?

Now that SNOWPOCALYPSE '10! has officially started, I got to thinking about snow day food. As a life-long Maryland resident, I am required by law to run to the nearest grocery store to stock up on the snow essentials (milk, bread, and toilet paper for the uninitiated) as soon as the S word appears in the forecast but I try not to imagine the scenario that requires surplus amounts of those three items. When snow comes, I have my own list of essentials.

Snow days require cinnamon rolls. Not fancy bakery ones, the kind that come in a tube in the refrigerator section of the grocery store with a can of white, oozy stuff substance in the end. Yes, I can make yeast bread from scratch now but not before coffee. This storm I am trying something new, refrigerator scones from The Immaculate Baking Company. I like scones and I had a coupon so I am hopeful they will be an adequate substitute. I have plenty of powdered sugar in the house (I've got milk of course) so I will be making my own white oozy stuff.

Snow days also require bacon. In all honesty, days of the week that end in Y call for bacon in my book but a snow day especially needs that porky, salty manna. Aside from its life-sustaining properties, bacon also helps warm up the house on chilly mornings ever since I discovered the wonders of making bacon in the oven. I used to slave over a hot, sputtering pan of bacon, making batch after batch because I didn't have a pan or a burner big enough to make more than 5 or 6 strips at a time. No more!

The key to great oven bacon is the combination of a half sheet pan with a rim and an oven-proof baking rack. I got my first half sheet pan from K-Mart from the Martha Stewart line but then my K-Mart closed and now I get them from Sysco, the restaurant supply store on Rt. 1 in Elkridge. The oven-proof racks were a lot harder to find. All the ones I got as wedding presents were lovely with little rubber feet to keep them from slipping on the counter. Unfortunately, they also kept me from putting them in the oven. I searched kitchen supply stores and catalogs. Then when I was just about ready to give up and order something really expensive on the internet, I spotted these at Target. They fit in a half sheet pan perfectly.

The other great thing about oven bacon is that it's very flexible about temperature. You can throw it in at whatever temperature the cinnamon rolls, apple oven pancake (recipe coming soon), or frittata is already in there. The hotter the oven, the faster it will cook but the final product won't suffer from being in there longer at a lower temperature.

Oven-baked Bacon

Ingredients

• Bacon
  
• Non-stick spray (Pam)
  

Directions

Preheat oven to 350-450°. Put the oven-safe rack in the half sheet pan. Coat the rack liberally with non-stick spray. Lay the bacon out so it covers the whole rack. It can overlap a little but it won't shrink nearly as much as bacon cooked on the stovetop. Depending on the oven temperature and how well done you like your bacon, bake for 15-25 minutes.