Cooking In, Dinner, Quick PostKerry Alaric CheeseboroDecember 15, 2013alcohol, bacon, baked, barbecue, BBQ, biscuit, booze, bourbon, bread, brown sugar, cayenne, cider vinegar, cinnamon, Cooking In, corn, cuimn, cumin, Dinner, garlic, ground, hot sauce, lemon juice, meat, meatball, meatballs, nutmeg, onion, paprika, pepper, pork, Quick Post, relish, sage, sauce, scallion, sesame, sesame seeds, spice, spiced, spicy, stewed, sweet, tabasco sauce, tangy, tobasco, vanilla, vinegar, worcestershire sauceComment

This Little Piggy Got Drunk

SPICY BOURBON BBQ PORK & BACON MEATBALL SANDWICH | Roasted Corn & Scallion Relish, Black & White Sesame Biscuit

SOMETIMES IT'S JUST AN IDEA that gets stuck in my head until I attend to it. So was it when, although not nearly the first to make pork meatballs, I needed to make bacon meatballs. Fairway wouldn't ground the smoked bacon they already had packaged, so I did it myself, adding some peppercorns to the mix, then adding ground pork, eggs, bread, sage, salt & pepper, soy sauce, paprika, and garlic powder.

And instead of covering with a marinara, I'd make a hearty, bourbon-based BBQ sauce, that included garlic, onion, tomato paste, mustard, cider vinegar, tabasco sauce, worcestershire sauce, brown sugar, cumin, paprika, cayenne, salt, pepper, cinnamon, and, yes, vanilla.

I browned of the meatballs in a large, wide skillet, then finished half of them in the oven, and the other half in the pot with the sauce cooking. In the meantime, I roasted an ear of corn, slicing of the slightly charred niblets and tossing them with some scallion in salt, pepper, sugar, and white wine vinegar to make a tart relish, and added black and white sesame seeds to an egg wash that I brushed onto the tops of store-bought raw biscuits before baking.

You can see the final outcome below, and I can tell you that the bourbon added a heady sweetness to my thick rich sauce, and helped carry the heat of the cayenne and tabasco up through the nose, across my shoulders, and down my back.

But don't ask me how much bourbon I used for the sauce. Some of it wound up in me during cooking and eating. You could say I got "sauced" in two ways...!