While you're frying up some eggs and bacon, we're cooking up something else: a way to celebrate today's food holiday.

It may technically be a Saturday, but it sure feels like Fry-day to us - August 31 is National Bacon Day.

While the bacon craze may have reached peak sizzle in the last decade, with dedicated festivals, bacon-based couture, and appearances in non-breakfast courses from sundaes to cocktails, America's fixation with delicious strips of cured pork is nothing new.
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Advance orders for Paula Deen's new cookbook have surged since the Food Network and Smithfield Foods axed her for using a racial slur.

Orders for "Paula Deen's New Testament: 250 Favorite Recipes, All Lightened Up" surged on Amazon by nearly 1,300% in the last 24 hours.
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5@5 is a food-related list from chefs, writers, political pundits, musicians, actors, and all manner of opinionated people from around the globe.

Editor's Note: Kaitlyn Goalen is the former National Edition editor of Tasting Table and one of the driving forces behind Short Stack Editions. Follow her on Twitter @kaitgoalen.

For most of my career, I’ve been writing about food for digital publications. Twitter, Instagram, cat GIFs (pronounced “jif,” we now know) and endless e-mails are all part of my daily routine.

But when it comes to my own culinary reading list, a surprisingly heavy percentage is dedicated to cookbooks. Not apps, not e-books. Physical printed cookbooks. It was a realization that recently led me to take a break from the digital landscape and launch a printed cookbook series called Short Stack.

Why, some may ask, when you can just as easily find recipes online and for free? Here are five answers to that very question.

Five Reasons to Care About Cookbooks in a Digital Age: Kaitlyn Goalen
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The new season of Game of Thrones premieres on April 6. Whet your appetite.

Black swan. Unborn puppies. A hundred live doves “baked into a great pie” and prepared to “burst forth in a swirl of white feathers.”

Those are some of the dishes I decided not to attempt for my Game of Thrones-themed dinner party.

George R.R. Martin’s “Song of Ice and Fire” books are famously long (1,040 pages for the latest installment), and roughly 50% of the word count is devoted to describing what the characters are eating. One wedding feast features an ode to most of its seventy-seven courses; even a rundown of frozen defense outpost’s dwindling supplies is good for a three-page litany about storerooms filled with “potted hare, haunch of deer in honey, pickled cabbage, pickled beets, pickled onions, pickled eggs and pickled herring.”

The HBO series embraces the books’ gluttonous spirit: The producers got a castle banquet into the very first episode.

For food fans, this is clearly a challenge. A thrown gauntlet. One week ahead of Game of Thrones season 3 premiere, I rounded up a few of my geeky friends - and some novices we hoped to convert - for our own recreation of a Westerosi feast.
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