Liniments, unguents, potatoes and bacon fat

Don’t underestimate the power of a decent fat to transform a pedestrian offering into tasty transcendence.

Finding myself painted in to another Coronavirus Corner, I cast about for potato recipes. Anything would have sufficed really, I just needed a way to get the potatoes cooked before they started sprouting, which I knew was at best a week away. It’s either that I can’t track how long I’ve had them, or there’s something about the climate of my kitchen, but they do love to sprout early. OK, the kitchen is not a root cellar. Perhaps one day I’ll own a castle with a true root cellar, in which my potatoes will keep, un-sprouted, through the long Alpine winters. They will have to be Alpine because if I’m going to live in a castle, it’s going to be in the Alps.

In the meantime, faced with the exigencies of expiring edibles, I root around for approaches to liquidating my list of lapsing legumes.

I stumble upon a recipe for roasted potatoes that seems to fit. Thank you, Serious Eats. The recipe doesn’t mention bacon fat as one of the many fat options. They talk about duck fat and goose fat and beef fat. These are all good fats, but the king of all fats is surely bacon fat. Knowing in my true heart that this recipe, in the omission, is clearly pointing to an undisclosed secret ingredient, I turned to my Strategic Bacon Fat Reserve and made a withdrawal.

With the enthusiasm of the uninitiated, I went hammer-and-tongs at the preparations and after a couple of minutes of mid-recipe madness, I regained my composure and produced garlic rosemary bacon-fat roasted potatoes. An unmitigated success. Crispy on the outside and soft and fluffy on the inside, I will surely be making these for many many years to come. God bless the Internet, and Idaho.