Free Yo' Bacon Marrrrr-ma-laaaaaaaade!

On this, Day 23 of 30 Days of Blogging, we are going off topic, because I have to tell you what I'm eating.

I don't have a man, but let's pretend that someday I might, and someday he might sleep over, and we'll assume that he didn't kick me or steal the covers or leave the closet door open (because OH MY GOD, HOW CAN I SLEEP WITH CLOSET MONSTER STARING AT ME?)or do anything else to make me wish slow death upon him, and instead we will imagine that I wake up first and want to prepare a special breakfast that says, "I want you to live and I want to do something really nice for you."

This is the breakfast that I would prepare:



Pancakes with bacon marmalade.

Yes, bacon marmalade is a thing that exists, and I made it tonight from a recipe in a "Southern comfort food" magazine.

To start, I needed a cup of sorghum syrup. For those unfamiliar, sorghum is a grass kind of like sugar cane, and sorghum syrup is produced from it. I had a bottle in my refrigerator that I'd already used some of for homemade barbecue sauce, so I was a little short of the cup this recipe called for:



I filled in the rest of the cup with molasses, which is not a perfect solution, but it's not like I keep extra sorghum in the pantry. It's really, really sweet.

Next I had to dice half a cup of bacon. Dicing bacon is a pain, because it is slimy and slips around when you're trying to slice, so I just cut it up with kitchen scissors:



After that I had to cook the bacon in a skillet. I usually do mine in the oven, but the recipe said skillet, so I cooked away:







Then I had to drain the bacon, wipe out the skillet, return the bacon to the skillet, add the sorghum, and cook it down a little, stirring frequently:



After that I had to add cider vinegar, which smells good but which you should not lean over while cooking:



cook until it reduced by half, then add chicken broth:



and reduce it down again:



And there it was.

I let it cool, made pancakes while it was doing so, and oh my God was this totally worth spending over an hour on dinner for. It tastes sweet, cidery, and bacony all at the same time, and then you bite into pieces of candied bacon while chewing and that's kind of indescribable.

Other than "delicious", I mean.