Frugal tip: cooking bacon

Do you ever buy 'cooking bacon'?  It seems an odd name - after all, isn't all bacon for cooking?
This consists of the off cuts after slicing, chopped small and rammed firmly into a container and sold as a 'Savers' product (in Morrison's it is anyway) for around 80p.

I had some and this is what I did.

I separated the meat from the fat, not a quick thing to do as it's all chopped and sort of mushed together but it wasn't hard.

I put the meaty bits into little single portion pots.  Eleven pots-worth at 8p a pot.  They are now labelled, bagged and in the freezer for future use.

Then I looked thoughtfully at the left over fatty bits (which did have a lot of bacon fragments on them).  It seemed a shame to just chuck them, especially as I am doing Breadline, one of the abiding principles of which is minimal waste.

So I popped them all in a frying pan and rendered the fat down over a slow heat.  It took a while but needed minimal attention.

Once the fatty bits were all cooked and crispy I strained off the fat and will use that for cooking.

Then there were the bits.  I tasted a few and they were lovely - crisp and not fat-textured in the least.  So I sprinkled them over my lunchtime soup for extra flavour and texture - those that hadn't already been nibbled, that is.  Delicious.

So in the end there was nothing to throw away!  Yay!