Tastes like... burning

I learned a very valuable fact this week: hot grease burns skin.

I learned a very valuable fact this week: hot grease burns skin. This fact in turn led me to derive a heretofore unrealized and quite revolutionary maxim that I believe is equally valuable: never cook bacon on "high." It is true, my friends, let me tell you; those wee little strips of hogflesh can reach out and bite you.

I was not fortunate enough to have made these two realizations a priori -- as the now-permanent scars on the underside of my right arm will attest. I was cooking this ill-behaved bacon to add to a new recipe that I had great hopes for. Sadly, however, the bacon (and my arm) burned and the flavor of the meal did little to justify the amount of pain it caused me.

Still, I ate it, and iced my arm for most of the evening. The damage was relatively minor (6 bits of nuclear grease left their respective high-velocity marks, two of them causing decent sized blisters), but severe enough to inspire the launch of a very adamant personal campaign against the cooking of bacon on "high."

Learn from my mistakes, friends, don't cook bacon on high!

Posted in Thoughts on Saturday, 2 August, 2003 (digg this)

Comments

Ken Knecht wrote:

Bacon grease...ah my friend, I wish I would have shared with you my own battle scars I have aquired over the years while preparing my favorite morning snack. Bacon, as it is cooked conventionaly in a frying pan is quite dangerous indeed. I still see the faint scar of a bacon grease bombardment I had some years ago. Be warned that bacon grease is not only partial to burns on the arms, it loves the stomach as well. Yes, let this be a warning that cooking bacon topless is also not a grand idea. I suffered second degree burns from bacon grease popping like fire crackers on the 4th of July in my frying pan. The red blisters formed a "constellation-like" pattern on my stomach which I appropriately coined "The Big Dipper".

I forever have a mark to remind me of my culinary mishaps and have since resorted to cooking bacon in the microwave, wrapped in several layers of Bounty paper towels. I have found that a 4 minute setting will produce 6 delicious strips of bacon without the dangers of permanent injury.

Posted on August 29, 2003 4:05 PM