Friday Food: Bacon Grease All Week

There was a lot of bacon cooked at our family get-together in Colorado, and I saved all the grease. Which I put in an empty jar and brought home with me. This probably cemented my reputation as The Weird Relative, but I got more than a cup of bacon grease out of it, which is totally worth it. And which I used every day this week.

That's a quart jar it's in. That's a lot of bacon grease.

Friday 

Short version: Ground bull burritos, green salad with vinaigrette

Long version: A pound of so of ground bull meat browned in bacon grease with half a can of black beans and spices and salsa. I was too lazy to even chop an onion or garlic, so I used the powders. It was still fine. And easy.

Saturday

Short version: Lamb, spaghetti with pesto, green salad with ranch dressing, cheesecake

Long version: This was the new 12-year-old's birthday dinner request. It's very lucky for him that pasta with pesto is his favorite and that his birthday happens to be right when there's enough basil in the garden to make pesto. 

He had asked for any kind of lamb, so I took out a boned-out leg roast, browned it (in bacon grease!), sliced it, then cooked it the rest of the way in the pan with sliced shallots from the garden, and cream.

I used the recipe for New York-style cheesecake in my Yellow Farmhouse Cookbook, which was written by Christopher Kimball. That means it was basically a Cook's Illustrated recipe. I made the New York-style kind because then I didn't have to separate the eggs and beat the whites with cream of tartar. 

That recipe was for a 10-inch springform pan, and I have a 9-inch pan, so I baked the extra batter in a disposable aluminum pan and gave it to our priest. I think I overbaked his, because it was smaller and I kind of forgot about it, but I'm pretty sure he'll still eat it. It's hard to completely ruin a cheesecake.

Sunday

Short version: Chicken and pesto, leftover spaghetti with pesto, fried potato, carrot sticks with ranch dip

Long version: One child had requested chicken, and the cheapest option for that was bone-in breasts. I had three of them in the package, so I poached those in the morning while it was still cool. At dinnertime, I just pulled the meat off, chopped it up, fried it in a lot of bacon grease, and added the rest of the pesto.

And then it still seemed dry, because chicken breast is, so I added some olive oil. And more bacon grease.

The potato was for A., because he doesn't eat pasta. I just microwaved it, chopped it, and fried it in . . . yup, bacon grease.

Monday

Short version: Fancy bean and cheese quesadillas, kohlrabi sticks, canned peaches with or without cottage cheese

Long version: When I make quesadillas for lunch, they are typically just cheese, sometimes beans. But for these, I used the rest of the blue corn tortillas my sister had sent home with us, some of the monterey jack cheese (a kind I never buy) also from the Colorado trip, the rest of a partial can of refried beans that had been in the refrigerator for awhile, garlic powder, and sliced jalapenos for those who like spice.

So I guess it was the garlic powder and jalapenos that made these fancy? Sure. And the blue corn tortillas.

Pretty.

After they were fried--in, of course, bacon grease--they were a very dark purple color. One child sat down at his place, looked at his place, and said quite matter-of-factly, "Wow. Those sure got burned." It sounded as if he had every intention of eating it anyway, however, and it was pretty funny.

I had two more kohlrabi in the garden that I harvested this day, so we had one of those for our vegetable.

I went to all the trouble of putting the can of peaches in the refrigerator to chill it before dinner, so I obviously get a gold star for this meal. Also a gold star for actually turning on the stove and frying the quesadillas, because it was so hot I was seriously tempted to just microwave them. These kind of tortillas are kind of dry that way, though, so frying was the way to go.

Hot, though. Eighty-three degrees when I finished making dinner. Definitely out of my temperature comfort zone.

Tuesday

Short version: Pesto chicken and potatoes, more kohlrabi sticks, creamy apricot popsicles

Long version: Hot again. I microwaved the potatoes before frying them (in you know what) so I wouldn't have to have the stove on as long, and then added the leftover pesto chicken, plus some more spices and salt.

The popsicles were just apricot jam, yogurt, and heavy cream. I never measure quantities for popsicles, except for knowing I need about 1.25 cups total to fill my four popsicle molds. I didn't have one, and one child wasn't here, so four was enough and I didn't have to get creative with butter knives.

Wednesday

Short version: Barbecue bull sandwiches, roasted potatoes, coleslaw, rhubarb pudding with cream

Long version: I took out a bag of pressure-cooked bull meat to thaw and then processed it further with my immersion blender before heating it with barbecue sauce. I realize when we sat down to eat that I missed an opportunity to add bacon grease to the meat. The bull meat is so lean, it can always use extra fat, and the bacon grease would have been good for that. It was tasty anyway, though.

I was baking bread anyway, so I made some buns, too. Potatoes roasted while the oven was on for the bread. I did put bacon grease on them.

I made the coleslaw with the very last cabbages from the garden, which were very small.

Paring knife for scale. A. drolly asked me if these were giant Brussels sprouts.

Despite their diminutive size, I still got enough shredded cabbage out of them to make a half recipe of this coleslaw. I also used one of the shallots I had dug up the day before. We only had about half a dozen shallots, but they did pretty well, and I do like shallots. I'll have to plant more this fall.

I hadn't yet made rhubarb pudding this summer. I thought the rhubarb was done for the year, but two plants staged a comeback, so I had enough to make this pudding. Two thumbs up.

Thursday

Short version: Hamburger steaks with gravy, boiled potatoes, corn on the cob, coleslaw, watermelon

Long version: This meal was much larger than I was anticipating, and all because I went to a city in the morning. In that city was a truck selling watermelons, corn, and cherries, all of which I got. I also got a big 10-pound roll of ground beef at the store.

Originally I thought I would make meatballs, but I didn't want to roll all those individual meatballs. So instead I made essentially really thick hamburgers, which I browned and then cooked in onions and some of the chicken stock from cooking the chicken breasts a few days previously. I thickened it with milk and cornstarch. This was something like Salisbury steaks, I guess, but those are more like meatloaf, with breadcrumbs and all. So I guess these were just hamburger steaks.

I suppose I should have fried them in bacon grease, but I also had some rendered beef fat in the refrigerator that had been there awhile, so I used that instead.

The watermelon was a big--like 30 pounds--seeded one, and it was only just okay. Not bad, but not as sweet as I was hoping. Boo.

Refrigerator check:

A watermelon (hiding in the back of the bottom shelf) plus a grocery run means my refrigerator is stuffed.

Okay, your turn! What'd you eat this week?