Red-letter day-Nueske's for breakfast!

If you've never tried Nueske's applewood-smoked, thick-sliced bacon, you have missed about the best bacon in the world. It's double the price of regular bacon, so we don't eat it often. It's pretty hard to find here--only available at Buck's meats inside the Mercier's applehouse (best applehouse and best fried pies in the world, by the by, and right here in Fannin County.)

We glommed onto this heavenly hog meat when friends of ours from Kentucky, Jim and Murdena Simmons, were visiting. Of course we took them to Mercier's! As we wandered around the patchwork of shops, we happened to pass a glass front cooler in Buck's meat shop. We looked over the elk steaks and other exotic meats in the case.

Suddenly, Jim exclaimed, "They've got Nueske's!"

Now you have to understand that, though he's a Southern Baptist Pastor and has spent his whole career in western Kentucky, Jim's from Chicago. And his family was from Wisconsin, before an ancestor swapped his large dairy farm to one J.L. Kraft in exchange for an executive slot with what later became Kraft foods.

The result of this was that Jim and his siblings enjoy a former community center--a lodge, really, which is (I understand) the old family 'retreat' near the Wisconsin dells. And a few miles away is this really cool family meat packing business called Nueske's. So he knew all about this best of all bacons.

It's now been a Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year's tradition to have Nueske's bacon for breakfast for a couple of years. And if you're very, very good, and take your wife canoeing when she wants to go, maybe, maybe, you'll get Nueske's for breakfast, too.