All I want for Christmas is a brand new Bacon Barn
Iknocked out five Christmas gifts Tuesday for a total of $100. I bought a $20 “Bacon Barn,” a plastic twopiece product for cooking bacon in the microwave, for — shh — pretty much everyone on my list.
Edmond manufacturer Phil Parduhn, the inventor of the product, gifted me one five years ago — and I’ve used it numerous times since.
At about a minute a slice, bacon cooks perfectly on an arched plastic tray with a splatterproof clear plastic lid. Slices don’t curl up, grease rolls into the troughs on either side, and the Bacon Barn, after wiping it down with a paper towel, can go right into the dishwasher.
Parduhn, 85, is among eight Sooners to be inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame on Thursday night.
He’s best known for co-founding 32-yearold Pelco Products Inc., which employs hundreds and manufactures traffic signal hardware that’s used across North America.
A signature product of the company is the Astro-Brac, a universal mounting system for traffic signals, cameras and sensors that can be fitted with bands or cables and rotate 360 degrees.
An industrial engineer, Parduhn holds 38 patents including for the Bacon Barn, a special golf club and unique bicycle reflectors.
The Home Shopping Network debuted his Bacon Barn in 1995 and — even at the offviewing hour of 9 a.m. one Tuesday — sold 700 of the barns in just three minutes, said Parduhn, who believes he can really launch the product once he has the time.
Of his initial batch of 5,000, roughly 2,000 remain. He manufactured the product in Arkansas.
“It’s the best product on the market,” Parduhn told me when we made our cash exchange. There was no need to convince me, having used another, lesser product that my sister bought me years ago.
Parduhn said he tested his product at Oklahoma State University, where researchers found bacon that was fried dry in the Bacon Barn contained 20 percent less fat than skillet bacon cooked in grease.
My pre-Black Friday Christmas buys align with national trends, according to a recent online survey commissioned by Austin-based creditcards.com.
Of 1,093 U.S. adults, just 53 percent will buy a gift that costs at least $50, including 27 percent who will fork over $100 or more on a single item.
Even of those households earning $80,000 and more (um, not me), 44 percent plan to keep their most expensive holiday gift under $100. Twelve percent of all respondents don’t plan to buy any gifts.
Another very cool thing about our recent hall of famer is that Parduhn’s company for 15 years has dedicated a work space for a dozen disabled Dale Rogers Training Center clients to work on-site, alongside his other employees, assembling traffic signal products.
If you need other Christmas ideas, you can shop for a cause at Dale Rogers’ Robin’s Corner Gift Shop, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays at 2501 N Utah Ave., or online at drtc.org.
Items include coffee, spices, mints, holiday cards and more.