Instead of bacon with your pancakes, you can now
have bacon in your pancakes—and chocolate, too.

You can now buy Vosges’ buttermilk pancake mix, dotted with chunks of Mo’s Bacon Bar. Or, buy the candy bar directly and chip it into your own pancake recipe. It’s a fun hostess gift, and it may even be “Man Bait,” as our friends at Das Foods, makers of the Maple Bacon lollipop (and other “shamelessly delicious” lollipops—stay tuned), might call it.

A container of Mo’s Bacon Chocolate Chip Pancake Mix is $12.00 and makes two batches of eight, five-inch pancakes. Can you have extra bacon on the side? Absolutely! Try some artisan bacon brand, though. If you don’t already buy it, you’re in for a real treat. It tastes so much better than mass-marketed brands.

Now we’re waiting for the chocolate bacon ice cream.

If you think your homemade macaroni and cheese recipe rocks, enter it in the fifth annual Tillamook Macaroni and Cheese Recipe Contest. Six home cooks (no professionals!) from around the nation will compete in the grand finale cook-off in Portland, Oregon on October 23rd. The deadline to enter your recipe is Monday, August 17, 2009 at midnight PST.

Finalists will compete for the 2009 title of the “Big Cheese,” $5,000 cash and 25 pounds of outstanding Tillamook cheese from Oregon (their great Cheddars and other cheeses have won awards worldwide). The first runner up will receive $2,000 cash and 20 pounds of Tillamook cheese; the second runner up will receive $1,000 cash and 15 pounds of Tillamook cheese. The People’s Choice Award winner takes home $1,000. Finalists and their guests will be flown out to Portland, where they will cook their recipes from scratch in front of a live audience and a panel of judges consisting of national culinary experts and professional chefs.

Mac & Cheese Chile Relleno Pie, the Second Runner Up recipe in the 2008 competition.

Want to see what the competition looks like? See some of the previous Tillamook macaroni and cheese winners:

• 2006 Recipes
• 2007 Recipes
• 2008 Recipes

First Kiss—salted caramel ice cream—could
keep someone kissing until the pint is empty.

This week, the Top Pick Of The Week honors go to Ruby et Violette’s luxurious cookie dough ice cream. Forget other cookie dough ice creams. As alluring as they might once have been, they pale in comparison to Ruby et Violette’s. This artisan company raises the bar to the point where you feel like you’re eating ice cream cake—no raw dough flavor, but the taste of the actual cookie.

Some history: The business was born as a specialty chocolate chip cookie baker, making 100 different flavors (about 20 at any given time). Ingredients are primo: excellent Belgian chocolate chips from premium chocolatier Callebaut, plus the finest French fruit and nut pastes and other ingredients (fine dried strawberries for the Super Strawberry chocolate chip cookie, for example). The chocolate chip cookies were a NIBBLE Top Pick Of The Week in 2005. In 2007 the founder retired, and the new owners brought new ideas, including the ice cream and some of the best brownies we’ve ever had. They were a NIBBLE Top Pick Of The Week in 2008, followed by the Seduction Cookies line, which debuted just in time for Valentine’s Day 2009 (and are our favorite of all 100+ cookies).

The result of this ice cream alchemy: creative flavors that are bursting with natural taste and amazing texture—creamy, rich ice cream, huge mouthfuls of cake-like cookie dough and as many crunchy chocolate chips as one’s heart could desire. Ruby et Violette is certainly the best in the Cookie Dough Ice Cream category, and once you dig in to a few flavors, you can decide where else to bestow superlatives. And, since it’s National Ice Cream Month, indulge!

• Read the full review.
• Read the review of Ruby et Violette’s chocolate chip cookies.
• See the Seduction Cookies line—chocolate-chocolate chip cookies in “seductive” flavors that are truly spectacular.
• Take a look at the sumptuous brownies.

But with the rise in popularity of neutral-flavored vodka in the 1980s, the vodka martini has morphed into an endless parade of full-flavored cocktails (one lounge in Chicago offers more than 100 varieties of vodka martini). Here are four special vodka martini recipes, plus a classic vodka martini recipe for the less adventurous, courtesy of Grey Goose vodka. These sophisticated drinks will generate excitement at any gathering.

• L’Orange Black Orchid Martini
• L’Orange Floridian Martini
• Maharaja’s Martini
• Black Truffle Martini (for those in the chips—it requires eight black truffles!)
• Classic Vodka Martini

Survive the summer heat with a Maharaja’s Martini, made with guava juice and fresh mint leaves. You need to be a maharaja to afford the Black Truffle Martini.

• What makes gin so special? Read about the ingredients that go into making it, and why each brand of gin has such a distinctive flavor.
• Want more ideas for summer cocktails? Find them in THE NIBBLE’s Cocktails & Spirits Section.

• Have a memorable s’mores party.
• Send someone Recchiuti’s deluxe s’mores kit, a NIBBLE Top Pick Of The Week.
• Make cinnamon s’mores with Food Should Taste Good’s cinnamon tortilla chips (instead of graham crackers), paired with a cappuccino cocktail.