I don’t drink, I don’t smoke and I don’t fool around. What is my vice? Bacon.
Bacon. There’s no diet in the world that allows it, doctors forbid it to their patients, it’s full of chemicals and toxins. But there is never any left over.
Mrs. Pluto has a standard bacon speech. She’s got it down pat now after years of reciting it every time I fry up some of that wonderful smoky-smelling breakfast meat. She yammers on about arteries and nitrites and fatherless children. I’m sure I’ve heard most of it by now but I have trouble paying attention to other things when there’s the aroma of bacon in the air.
In the past few weeks I have sunk deeper into depravity. I have discovered “Fletcher’s Bacon Ends and Pieces”. Fletcher’s is a premium brand of bacon. Ends and pieces are the trimmings from the pork bellies that can’t be made into neat slices. They’re just jumbled into a a two pound wad and vacuum sealed. We call it the “Loaf O’ Bacon” here at Plutoville. Despite the random size and shape of the pieces, the taste is unimpaired. And they are particularly easy to prepare since you don’t need to carefully separate the rashers and keep them aligned in the frying pan. You just dump in the ends and pieces and stir them with a spatula once in a while. And the Loaf O’ Bacon is inexpensive (for bacon – it is just ends and pieces, you know). You can imagine what this is like to someone whose bacon resistance is already compromised. I will soon have to check into the Miss Piggy Memorial Bacon Addiction Clinic if I can’t change my ways. But I don’t want to stop.
However – there is a small fly, so to speak, in the ointment. It’s that darned bacon grease. You’ve got to drain the bacon periodically. You can’t pour it down the drain or it will clog your pipes just like it clogs your arteries. The grease is hot, so not just any container will do to hold it. I usually pour it into a ceramic cup and, after it congeals, scrape it into the kitchen trashcan. But then you still have a greasy cup and now a greasy spoon to deal with.
I have hit on a solution but I don’t have all the bugs worked out yet. We always have paper cups around for when someone wants a drink of milk or cold water or juice. If you poured your hot bacon grease into a waxed paper cup you could just throw the whole thing away when it cools. Unfortunately, before it cools it melts the wax, causing the bottom seal in the cup to fail, allowing the grease to leak out all over the counter. Trust me. It does this. However, if you use TWO paper cups, nested, it only leaks about half the time. My theory was to accelerate the rate of cooling so that the grease had lost its ability to melt its way out before it leaked through the second cup. The solution: Ice cubes!
So here’s the new method – stack two paper cups, place an ice cube inside and then pour in the grease. The ice cools the grease, the grease doesn’t leak out. Everyone’s happy. (Except Mrs. Pluto but she’s not here right now, is she?) Good theory. Limited success.
Two things I didn’t know: 1) Ice doesn’t float in bacon grease. It just sits at the bottom of the cup. 2) Congealed grease is a pretty good insulator. It forms a thin, insulating shell around the ice, preventing proper cooling from occurring.
So, although the two-cups-and-an-ice-cube experiment was somewhat successful (the grease didn’t leak out, but inspection showed significant melting of the outer cup), further research is still necessary. I’m thinking that the next step is to use more ice cubes. I’m also wondering if dry ice floats in hot grease.
