To recap: I embarked on an experiment to concoct my own bacon vodka, an one-woman moonshine operation on August 30.  The mason jar was wrapped in 3 layers of plastic bags and I had not been able to muster enough courage to peek inside it.  What was I afraid that I might see floating in the jar?

Alien babies?

Van Gogh’s ear?

Mundane green goo?

Tadpoles? (I have a REAL, as opposed to fake…, phobia against frogs so that would indeed be part of my worst nightmares…)

I can’t really tell ya.  The fact is: I didn’t take a look at my concoction until two weeks afterwards, and it looked like this:

As opposed to how it looked in the very beginning:

I am not sure I will be brave enough to put it anywhere near my mouth or nose, to be completely honest…

One more week to go, my friends.  In the mean time, let’s read about the Bacon Beer, shall we?

“We just about lost it when we heard Brooklyn Brewery brew master Garrett Oliver was working on a beer made from Benton’s Country Smokehouse bacon, and now it’s a reality.

The catch is: You’ll have to pay $350 for a taste of Reinschweinsgebot, as Oliver is calling it.”

Ugh. People in New York City slay me.  $350 for a sip of that beer?  Forget it.  Give me enough tomato juice and add a lot of alcohol, I should be able to swallow my DIY bacon vodka when the time comes.

Stay tuned.  Oh, and you are ALL invited to the launch cum tasting party!

Before I got distracted by Kanye West, and Joe “You Lie” Wilson, and other entertaining news happening on the Interweb (and I guess, also in the real world), on August 30 I got inspired and decided to make my own moonshine based on a recipe I got from, where else? the Interweb:

“Add cooked bacon to a clean pint sized mason jar. Trim the ends of the bacon if they are too tall to fit. Or you can just throw in a bunch of fried up bacon scraps. Crushed black peppercorns can be added for a real zing, but check your zinger scale of tolerance first.

Fill the jar up with vodka. Cap and place in a dark cupboard for at least three weeks. Then place the bacon vodka in the freezer to solidify the fats. Contact local authorities to be on hand before opening and then strain out the fats through a coffee filter. The yield should be clear, pale yellow bacon vodka. (If it is any other color, check with health officials.) Decant into decorative bottles and enjoy.”

(I naturally blogged about how I came to this madness: here, and also my shopping trip & prep for the experiment, called “Step 1” here.  My apology for having lied: there’ll be no post called Step 2 as you might have expected…)

Step 1: Cook bacon.  Open the bag of raw bacon and gingerly remove them one by one from the said bag while thinking,

Yew. This is so disgusting!

Step 2: Wash hands so as not to get grease on microwave oven when you “cook” the bason

Step 3: Cook bacon for, hmm, how long?  Your guess is as good as mine.  How about 2 minutes since you have no patience?

Step 4: Open microwave to check on bacon.  Yew.  Still raw.  Continue to zap bacon in microwave.

Step 5: Bat off hungry kids who are hungry because you forgot to feed them, for the sake of SCIENCE, y’all!  “I smell bacon?  Is that bacon?  Mom, can we have some bacon?”

Step 6: Admonish children for calling Perfectly Edible Food “disgusting” by saying, “There are starving children in China, you know?”

Step 7: Gingerly transport the grease-soaked paper towels to the trash, mindful not to drip any grease on the floor.  Oh, and take a picture of the bacon ’cause you know you are going to blog about it.  (Only you don’t know that it’ll take you more than 2 weeks to actually blog about it because you are lazy that way).

Step 8: Curse yourself when you open the fridge and see this:

Then immediately comfort yourself with the conviction that YOUR bacon vodka is going to turn out so much better ’cause you used the REAL, raw, greasy, fat-dripping bacon.  Oh, yeah.

Step 9: Add cooked bacon to mason jar and fill jar with vodka.  The good kind!  Another sacrifice you’ll make for SCIENCE…

Cry when you see the bottle of vodka more than half gone because the mason jar is deceptively roomy…

And remember: You are doing this for SCIENCE!

Step 10: Try and think of something quickly to explain to your children:

“What the hack is that?”

“Don’t use that kind of language.”

“Mom, what is that?  Is that your bacon vodka?”  “Are you really going to drink that?”  “That is so disgusting!”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Mom.  Why?”

The final step: Wrap it in 3 layers of plastic bag because you are not sure whether it will have some chemical reaction and either ooze goo or worse, burst open the glass jar.   Leave it in the cupboard.  And wait…

p.s. Do NOT forget to tell your husband about it before you leave for a business trip.  Imagine his surprise when he finds it…