PMS dinner

Sometimes a girl gets a little grumpy, life seems a little difficult to navigate, and strange back pains start cramping her style. Sometimes she just really, really wants some bacon. Which is what sent me out of the house at 7pm to the little local/sustainable/organic/healthy/green grocery store to get some of their marvelously smoky bacon, prepped by a local chef (from Cafe Estelle, the same bacon I used for ice cream). I went straight past the girl giving out nut butter samples to the meat freezer, which was full of steaks and shanks and other large meat packages, but devoid of bacon. The clouds covered the sun, the flowers began to wilt, the boxes of fresh fruit started to bruise, suddenly the world seemed gray and dark. I gave the grocer a mournful look. Upon hearing what I was looking for, he suddenly morphed into a porky knight in armor shined with bacon grease riding a hairy, frothing boar. Extolling the virtues of the bacon, he bounced over to a cooler, and pulled out a huge pack of bacon that had just been delivered. And, like the bacon, I was suddenly delivered from my misery. Praise the Lord of the Flies.

So this is less of a recipe and more of a vice. I really like bacon, and I really like cooking with the leftover bacon fat. I don't have any tricks for it, and there's probably oodles of amazing things that I could do instead, but usually I just throw a bunch of potatoes into the fat until they smell and taste like bacon. Potato-y bacon.

These are Rose Gold potatoes, from Savoie Organic Farm that have a little bit of sage and marjoram thrown in, courtesy of my housemate's garden. I let them fry in the bacon fat for awhile, and then threw a little water in, covered the pan, and let them steam for a bit.

The cucumber and tomato, my concessions to non-bacon food groups, are also from Savoie. The tomato is an heirloom beefsteak tomato, definitely the best beefsteak I've ever had. The cucumbers are also heirloom, also fantastic, and have a beautiful yellow skin to boot. I've been eating them all week, raw and unadorned, because they're just that delicious. And also because the weather is still hot, muggy, and terrible.

On another note, I went fruit picking up at Weaver's Orchard on Tuesday, with a whole host of lovely people, and we picked a whole lot of fruit. There's pie dough and vanilla ice cream mix in my fridge, so there's some more legit blog posts and photos in the works, but for now I'll just leave you with a little preview of things to come.