I spent New Years in Vermont, celebrating with a few friend. Intent on getting as much time on the mountain as possible, I went to bed early on New Years Eve so I could be the first on the slopes New Years day. It was a great plan, except for one hitch – the temperature was 0 F, and with the windchill, -23 F. Ouch. While the skiing was good, I ended up coming down with a condition known mainly by it’s Latin name: nutusfrozeni tochairliftus – not a condition I would wish upon an enemy.
In the group-cooking that ensued over the holidays, someone made lasagna, and drained the beef fat into a bowl rather than just pour it down the drain. This is generally a good idea, unless you have an energetic 12 year old (emotionally speaking) wandering around your house.
One bad idea lead to another, and I ended up making a fat candle by plunging the wicks or birthday candles into the fat, and lighting them. It burned for about an hour until someone blew it out in disgust.
But, for future reference, when the world economy truly goes down the drain and you are sitting around in your cold, dark house, you know that you can light your house with the fat left over from cooking hamburgers/your neighbors cat/your neighbor.
If anyone would like to do this at home, the trick is to make sure the wicks go all the way to the bottom, and are preferably anchored to something. If the wick is too short, it has nothing to support itself in the liquid tallow, and just falls over, extinguishing itself. That’s what happened to the one on the right in the photo.
