- Sep 5

When love goes wrong, travel and start a blog

"The story is about how a professional eater met a professional chef and now we share stories, recipes and video on our site." Ayngelina Brogan

I added this to my list of websites to explore because of the title. It was different, and enticing - I mean who doesn't love bacon, but as on the Facebook title page as shown above, the title Bacon is Magic is pretty low profile and the big message is in huge block letters - "The best food around the world. Where to find it + How to make it" which is a much more accurate description of what it's all about and maybe a little harder to encapsulate in short form. Although now I see - and this just proves I'm slow - that that phrase 'Pigs can fly', which that logo picture illustrates does really encapsulate the message - Magic, food, travel.

However I will still say that it's a little bit strange why the About section contains no reference at all to why the sebsite is called Bacon is Magic. I had to look elsewhere for that - an interview on Food Bloggers of Canada, where in answer to my question - why the title - she says:

"Bacon is Magic was a joke between friends of mine because I always put a bit of pancetta in my vegetarian minestrone, chorizo in roasted tomato sauce and I wrapped asparagus in prosciutto – because pork makes food taste better and bacon is magic."

So who is 'she'? She is Ayngelina - Brogan I later found from elsewhere, and she is Canadian - from Nova Scotia. Hence her love of lobster - a favourite food.

She began writing her blog back in 2010:

"In 2010 I took a career break from my life working in an ad agency. I sold nearly all my possessions, ended a long-term relationship and bought a one-way ticket to Mexico. I thought the site would be a nice way to document the journey."

The site back then, however, was a much more amateurish affair called The Traveluster - well

that's what the url says, but the title is still Bacon is Magic although the subtitle back then was Living life with a different set of rules. It's worth a very quick look just to see how far website design has come. And no flying pig.

Travel she did - mostly in Central and South America - still a favourite destination I suspect, but then there must be many life-changing memories attached to her time there. For she did not just wander around from place to place. She actually lived at various different times in the Galapagos, Cuba and I think Ecuador - the Philippines too. I think in that interview, as she was deciding what to do with her life, she recalled her mother asking her when she was asking whether to do something or not - "Well what's the worst can happen?" which is something I have asked myself from time to time, and when you consider what the worst can be, you usually can see that you could potentially deal with it. Life goes on does it not? As it did for Ayngelina:

"For the first few years it was about my solo travel but in 2013 I met a chef and we fell in love so now the story is about what we discover on the road but also what happens at home because food is at the center of everything we do."

I'm not sure where she now lives - in Novia Scotia I am guessing where she and her partner Dave, run a pop-up restaurant in a bar and are trying to save enough to open their own restaurant. Although they still travel a lot.

So what sort of thing can you find on the website? Well currently on the Home page, to name just a few there are the following:

21 South Cebu foods you'll want to travel for, an article that is typical of many that introduce the foods of a particular destination, be it as broad as an entire country, or as specific as a town. And these articles will also include links to other sites, and recommendations of where to eat.

A word here about the presentation of the posts. The photographs are excellent - apparently she took a few lessons from that long-ago deserted love who was a photographer, and he introduced her to a book on the subject. The information provided is clear, informative, but not very detailed, and also not amazingly well written. The worst thing - as with an increasing number of sites, is the constant interruption of ads - either external ads, or continual exhortations to subscribe to the website, and every time you come to one - not only is the flow interrupted by the intruding picture but the whole page does a kind of jump. Hate it. But I guess that's how they all make their money.

Hodge podge - a vegetarian delight in Novia Scotia I think this post may be where I came across this site as the photograph looks familiar. A while ago now I used the word Hodgepodge as title of one of my oddments pieces, because it not only is the name of a particular dish but it's also used to mean a collection of odds and sods. In this case spring vegetables turned into a chowder like soup. There are several posts on her site about a particular dish, always associated with a particular country - on the Home page for example there is a link to a Finnish cucumber salad. As with the things to eat in a particular location, there is more than just the recipe - a bit of history, a bit of personal memoir and so on. Useful stuff.

The Caesar drink - Canada's national cocktail. There are quite a few posts about drinks - mostly cocktails. The Italian spritz is another one and one that I may explore myself some time. I've added it to my list of ideas anyway because I really am quite interested in the rise of the cocktail. It seems to me that cocktails are often the drink of choice of Gen X or is it Y? - the 30-50 year-olds anyway. Probably younger than them as well, but I don't know as many of them. My grandchildren are too young for alcohol as yet. But going back to the Caesar drink I thought it was something to do with Caesar salad but no. It was invented in 1960 in Calgary

and "it was meant to reflect the flavours of spaghetti alla vongole – spaghetti with clams and tomato sauce." So not Caesar salad then. Urban myth has it that:

"The name Caesar is said to come about from a patron of Chell's who shouted out, “that's a damn good Caesar”

Chell is the surname of the inventor and possibly the name of the restaurant too. Not that that explains anything either. Suffice to say that in 2010 Parliament no less named it the official cocktail of Canada. It even has its own national day. Here it is below with the Italian Spritz Veneziano on the right.