Since I’ve been cooking once a week, Mike has taken to making breakfast. The first few times he made pancakes, and he threw in some fruit and chocolate chips (yummy). This past Friday he made eggs, toast, and bacon. YUM!
Growing up, my Gramma kept a Maxwell House coffee can next to the stove. I once asked her what it was for, and she said she “kept the fat” in it. Not long after, I saw her pour a pan of bacon grease into the can. The grease, she said, would clog the drain if she poured it down the sink, so she poured it into a can and disposed of it when it was full.
After Mike made the bacon last week, he asked me what he should do with the fat. I grabbed an empty Diet Coke can out of the recycling and told him to pour it into the can. I laughed watching Mike try to juggle a large skillet and a small soda can. It was messy.
Once breakfast was over, we cleaned up Annie and then the kitchen, talking about our plans for the day and weekend. Mike stood in front of the sink, washing dishes, and he absent-mindedly reached for the Diet Coke he was drinking. Except…he didn’t grab his drink. He grabbed the can with the fat.
Before I could stop him, he brought the can of fat to his lips and tossed it back. I gasped and then held my breath. His eyes went wide and he screamed “HEATHER!” Then he started gagging and spitting into the sink, and I couldn’t help but start giggling. He grabbed a napkin and started wiping his tongue and he glared at me while I laughed.
“You suck! You made me put the fat in a can! This is your fault!” He said while he scrubbed his tongue.
“HA! The can didn’t feel different to you?”
“NO! I’m going to be tasting bacon for days!”
“And that’s a bad thing because…?” Tasting bacon for days sounded pretty awesome to me.
Four days later, Mike says he can still taste the fat. I still fail to see how that’s a bad thing.
{ 49 comments… read them below or add one }
Sounds remarkably reminiscent of an episode of Friends, if I remember correctly…!
Kirsty´s last [type] ..Remembering
Exactly what Kirsty said…except ROSS was stopped at the vesy last second!!
very–not vesy
my mom did the exact same thing!
OMG!!! SO GROSS!!! POOR MIKE BUT I DO HAVE TO AGREE WITH HEATHER….BACON TASTES SO GOOD SO WHAT’S ALL THE WHINING FOR? HA HA HOPE YOU’RE RECOVERING WELL MIKE!!!
SO WHAT’S FOR BREAKFAST NEXT TIME???
This is pretty darned funny…. Bacon is nature’s candy ya know!
Shan´s last [type] ..And I’m Rollin’ Faster Than A Locomotive…
Gag! lol
We keep bacon grease in a mason jar, in our fridge. Not other fats and grease – just from the bacon. We use it to cook other things in – most anything that begins with sauteeing onions or a roux. Or fresh green beans. Even to pop popcorn on the stove with it. It’s really good.
Ours is kept in the fridge, too, in an old 16oz tomato can. And we, too, use it in all sorts of cooking. Its particularly good as the source of fat for corn bread…
Mark Duddridge´s last [type] ..September Mourn
Tasting bacon for days sounds AWESOME to me!!
But, ew, maybe you should find a Maxwell Coffee can to store the fat in next time!
AmazingGreis´s last [type] ..9/11/2001 – 10 Years Later – I Remember…
The one where No one is ready! Ross has to drink the fat to prove his love to Rachel. Then she stops him and gets all dressed up and they leave. This was a Friends trivia question right?
Poor Mike. That would suck so bad, and it is SO something I would do. That had to be disgusting. How did you not pee your pants, I would have from laughing so hard. Hope his tastebuds lose the fat taste soon. I have a smallish gladware container that I use for the fat.
Aubrey´s last [type] ..Kaitlynn
We use a can opener to take the top off the soda can before we pour the fat into it. It makes it much easier to pour the fat from the pan into the can AND nobody is likely to pick it up and drink it.
Ewwww. Poor Mike!
I can taste the fat from reading this post!!!! Get yourself some glass Ball jars and start storing stuff in them….They are wonderful ~ inexpensive, durable, won’t absorb flavors, perfect for storing anything! My tip for the day.
Only in Louisiana ~ documenting the adventures of life!´s last [type] ..To the Victor goes the spoils
We use an old tomato sauce jar and keep it in the freezer until it’s full. Ugh, I cannot imagine what a mouthful of that stuff would be like – thank goodness it wasn’t still burning hot!
Gagging at the thought. For what it is worth, we use a rinsed out wide-mouth pickle jar that I store under the sink. When it gets full I toss it….and no risk of (gag gag gag) drinking it.
blech!! however, i would have been laughing right along with you! how could you not!?!
I can’t believe this is the first time you’ve cooked bacon, LOL! Or, what did you used to do with the fat? We use frozen juice, and keep the tin on the counter for little bits of garbage, or gooey things, or fat, then toss when we make the next juice.
It is a little funny though, LOL. Good thing it was bacon and not pork roast fat or something really gross!
TracyKM´s last [type] ..Indianapolis, Day 7
My Mom did the exact same thing .. and with a Maxwell House can too!
My now husband used to dip andI hated it–it was gross, messy, and I’d have to pick up those nasty spit bottles. When we were getting married, the night before the wedding was the rehearsal dinner, drinks, and dancing. The next morning I had to run a few errands before heading to the church and I was so thirsty and a little dehydrated from the night before. Forgetting that my lovely soon-to-be husband had my car the night before I grabbed what I thought was my coke from the previous day. Yes, I drank day old spit on MY WEDDING DAY!!! I could not pull that car over fast enough and proceeded to dry heave on the side of the road. Let’s just say he has since quit his dipping habit.
I keep glass jars (from jam/pickles/spaghetti sauce/salsa, etc) under the sink for storing fat.
Oh my! Thank you for the morning laugh! That is the funniest thing I have read in a long while! Poor Mike! By the by… I use an empty can can… like soup, veggies, whatever. You keep the fat and then freeze it in between so you don’t have a sloppy drippy mess near your stove. Toss it when its full! Still laughing at the visual with this one!
Can. not. breath. That is so funny! Obviously made me think of that Friends episode. Although this wasn’t so much a show of love as just a really hilariously horrible mistake.
And tasting bacon for days does sound pretty awesome. I doubt I’ll try sipping fat to get the effect though.
Abigail @ Skywaitress´s last [type] ..Insignificant Details
hahaha, my husband did the same thing a few years ago. To this day, he swears it was the grossest thing he has ever tasted. Now I can tell him he’s not the only one who has drank bacon fat.
Oh my gosh that’s awful! Poor Mike! I’m on low carb diet and eat bacon often and you actually CAN dump bacon fat down the sink as long as you have a garbage disposal. Just make sure to run plenty of water down while you’re dumping and have the disposal on. Although, I may start saving it… the suggestions of using it to cook sounds great!
1. So funny!! I could just picture what happened as soon as you said you grabbed a soda can.
2. As a vegetarian this kind of makes me want to gag. I grew up eating meat, but all that fat grosses me out now.
3. Growing up, my mom always let the fat sit in the pan and then she’d scrape it out straight into the garbage when it was cool. You may want to try that to avoid any future similar incidences (at first I thought maybe Annie grabbed the can to drink it – that would have been so sad!).
‘Yep, its fat. I drank fat’
‘I know, I just did that 5 minutes ago’
hahahaha, YUCK!!!
p.s you can use a soup can also!!
Amy´s last [type] ..Maizey-isms
Somehow I knew where this story was going and I had a flashback…I was driving my brothers car (we live in the hottest part of the South) and I was SO THIRSTY…so in the cup holder was a Sprite can. SWEET, I thought…I threw it back in my mouth. IT WAS NOT SPRITE…it was DIP SPIT.
It still makes me sick to think about it…that was 10 years ago.
We also use a can opener to open the top of the can to avert such tragedies. We don’t drink coffee, but my mom used to give me her old coffee cans….I guess they don’t sell coffee in tin cans anymore.
Growing up my mom always kept a jug of water in the fridge. I would walk in, pour a glass and chug. One day I walked in, poured a glass, began to chug and to my horror found I was drinking vinegar. WHAT THE HELL MOM!??! Why would you keep white vinegar in the fridge, in a jug that looks just like the water jug?! She came back with a “I thought you would smell it” … whatever. I was furious with her until a few hours later my dad did the exact same thing. Vinegar promptly removed. We’re all pretty dumb apparently.
Jess´s last [type] ..My Boy.
Ha! Hilarious!!
Next time you finish off a jar of pickles or jelly or something that comes in a glass jar, save the jar for your fat. We keep ours under the sink.
Kristin´s last [type] ..2nd Grader
ok, that is seriously gross. However, I do keep bacon fat and use it to cook my eggs in so it has that nice bacon flavor.
Ditto to the ‘keep your bacon fat for cooking.’ You can use it in place of a lot of things.
Growing up, we kept a glass jar under the sink where my parents would keep leftover grease from cooking. We would just keep adding to it until the jar was full and then we would throw out the jar and start a new one. I never questioned this until I moved in with my husband and saw the strange look on his face the first time he saw the “grease jar”. I just assumed that everyone had one!
That’s one of my favorite Friends episodes! I feel bad for Mike, as much as I like bacon, what he did sounds very unpleasant!
I usually pour the fat back onto the styrofoam package (if it’s meat) or line a container with foil and when it’s solid (ewww) then I throw that out. I find that grease jars smell
I feel Mike’s pain. I recently took a sip of coffee/cream that had been sitting out for three days.
Go ahead and judge me for even leaving it on my desk that long.
I live alone, though. I’m not putting anyone else in danger, as far as I know.
oh god!!! yuck!!!!
bacon is good, but drinking all our bacon fat is just revolting!
something similar happened to me, i must have been about 10, and we used to have this old plastic milk gallon bottle in our fridge that we’d fill with water to keep cold. I used to come home from school, grab a glass, go to the fridge, shake the gallon water bottle before pouring myself a glass. this one day I did that, but instead of just shaking it, I shook it up and over my head very vigorously and it turned out there wasn’t a lid on the bottle so I got drench with ice cold water. it was funny as hell.
not as bad as drinking bacon fat, but similar “not paying attention and disaster happens” moment.
now I always check to make sure there is a lod on anything that I shake before hand!
Becca_Masters´s last [type] ..Twenty, twenty, twenty four hours ago, I wanna be sedated.
My grandma used to store the fat in a coffee can under the sink. Then she’d take a scoop out and use it to fry up whatever new thing she was making. Mmmmm, gotta love 50′s style cooking.
So what’s the problem, Mike? Bacon fat rules. I, too, keep it in the refrigerator to cook with. Delicious used to fry potatoes in, or pork chops, or eggs, or bacon fat plus butter for fried chicken or fish. Yum. In this day of healthy eating, it isn’t necessarily PC to cook like this, and I don’t always, but my grandmother did the same thing and so did my mom. There were no better cooks than those two.
We had a grease can, but my mom reused that grease for cooking! I’m totally from the South, by the way.
Oh, yes! The grease jar! We always had one too! Mostly coffee cans, but now I use glass jars– I’m a Classico (pasta sauce) lover so I use those jars. Some people (and a few commenters here, I see) keep the “good fat” like from Bacon and such for future cooking, but I’m way too sloppy of a cook for that! There was an “Everybody Loves Raymond” episode where Ray’s mom got all pissed at the dad for throwing out the grease from Pancetta she was saving for a special occasion. (I thought maybe it was an Italian thing
Kelly @ JourneysAndDetours´s last [type] ..Thank You, President Obama
My sister came home for a hot day on the tennis courts and grabbed what she thought was a glass of water off the counter and chugged it — it was bleach!! Our nurse mother was big on bleach which is why lots of our clothes looked tie dyed! I think she called poison control and they said she would be ok.
One pointer for using glass jars for storing grease — if it is still hot, put a table knife in the jar before pouring to keep the glass from breaking. I, too, was afraid you were going to say Annie got a swig of bacon grease! She is sure a little doll baby! Know she is loving the new house.
My husband keeps a jar or bacon fat in the fridge to use later. Yum!
Just curious what you do for your other meals? Take-out?
Everyday Food – there’s a mini magazine and an iPad app from martha stewart are pretty simple to follow.
We hardly ever get take out. For breakfast it’s a lot of fresh fruit, yogurt, and cereal. We don’t usually have time for anything more in the mornings, except on weekends. At night we have microwave meals, sandwiches, soups, stuff like that.
Oh, you are prepping food then! I was trying to imagine how the week went by without “cooking” but you are in the kitchen. Enjoy your new home, it looks wonderful, worth waiting through house #1.
(I originally found your website because we had a super-preemie as well. It always amazed me that no parent support for the turmoil of NICUs was offered or available.)
Beer bottle on the kitchen table, maybe 1/3 full. We were young, smoking (could do that in the house then), and putting our butts out in the bottle. Along comes my father….yup, put the bottle to his lips and took a long pull on it.
He still smoked until his death. We all quit eons ago.
This is one of those weird subjects that I have wondered about. As a little girl I recall my mom getting yelled at for having way too many jars of grease under the sink. I always used coffee cans. I have too many right now. I am glad to read that I am not the only one who saves bacon grease to season many foods. Fried taters are yummy with a couple of spoonfuls of bacon grease thrown in. I keep mine in a coffee cup in the fridge. Heather you should start saving it. Yummy!
OMG. How. Awful!!
I’m a vegetarian and this thought is just horrifying!! I’d probably need therapy after this! LOL
Doesn’t fat get all hard once it cools? I don’t know how I know that. I always thought it turned into a hard gel, making this impossible.
Good to know that that’s not the case!
Madi G
Oh my God, this is hilarious. I mean, I’m sorry that happened to him, but I totally would have been cracking up too.
Rachael´s last [type] .."Awesome"
You have to ask @gavmartell about the time he accidentally drank the frying oil from his mom’s fridge. VOMIT. I think he still tastes THAT, like 20 year later.