and things went downhill from there

Did you ever have one of those ideas that seemed good in your head at the time?

Since we couldn't agree on what we wanted for breakfast this morning, we ended up taking turns in the kitchen and feeding ourselves. atara made herself some "dippy eggs" with bacon and toast. Since I was planning to make myself pancakes - which would take longer - I let her use the kitchen first.

I decided to have eggs and bacon with the pancakes, so I gave the frying pan a quick wipe and put it back on the heat with two slices of bacon. While they slowly rendered out, I started throwing together some pancake batter.

I mixed up most of the wet ingredients first - an egg, milk, vanilla and sour cream (part of my reason for making pancakes was to use up some of our leftover sour cream). I let that sit for a moment while I tossed together flour, sugar, baking powder, and baking soda in another bowl. I was walking over with the salt when I was struck by an intriguing idea.

The reason I had not added any oil to the wet ingredients was that I was still debating on whether I was just going to use oil, or get fancy and add melted butter. As I was about to add some salt, I noticed the container of bacon grease that atara had left on the stove to cool, and it occurred to me that I had a third option.

I mean, what's bacon grease but meat butter with lots of delicious, delicious cholesterol? I estimated that between the amount she'd left, and the amount I was producing with the bacon I was cooking, it would be the perfect quantity for a batch of pancakes.

So when my bacon was done cooking, I removed it to some paper towels and poured the fat into the container on the stove so that it would cool a bit. I let it sit for about a minute to tame itself and then whisked it into the wet ingredients before dumping in the dry and stirring it together into a batter.

The batter was a strange colour, and I worried that I might end up with dense, greasy pancakes. I worried for nothing. These were some of the lightest, fluffiest pancakes I've had in some time. And they were delicious. I mean, they had bacon fat in them. How could they NOT be delicious?

So ... yeah. This was one of those ideas that seemed good in my head and turned out to be even better than I'd hoped.

... who keeps a little tub of saved bacon grease in the freezer.

We are into the time of year where the nice days become more frequent and the brutal days more rare. Yesterday was a nice day.