Crisco is hydrogenated vegetable oil, very unhealthy. Lard is animal fat, a better choice. These days I use coconut oil or butter for most frying except I use canola or peanut oil in the deep fryer. We use olive oil quite a bit too, and as mentioned before we season some things with bacon grease. When I open a pkg of bacon I cut an inch or two off the fattest end. We keep those pieces in the freezer to season things. The shorter pieces of bacon fit my microwave cooker better too.
It's a vegetable oil that is often known as shortening. Crisco is still on the market, by the way, although it's not the same thing. In 2007, they reformulated it to be with less than one gram of trans fat per serving.
I've never had Crisco unless it was in something and I didn't know it. My mom never bought the stuff, only real butter at our house and since that's how I grew up that's how continued in my family. I've never bought margarine either....at our house when I was growing up that was like a sin.
The problem is that most of this stuff was marketed as being healthier than what had been used before. Lard was portrayed as unhealthy, while Crisco was the healthier alternative. Margarine was marketed as being a healthier alternative to butter. Diet colas were better than those made with sugar. Rather than using their own common sense, people deferred to the experts, who were employed by the companies selling this stuff. We still do that today, only it's generally the government that's doing the selling. We need to start looking at things for what they are, regardless of what the experts say. If it doesn't make sense to you, it is possible that you simply don't understand it, but it's equally possible that it simply doesn't make sense. Following health recommendations, we swing one way and the back another.
We just went with what tasted better when I was little at our house. My mom used mazola corn oil for frying and she never used anything else. Always Mazola, so when I got married that's what I used also. I don't remember health concerns except the obvious too many calories and too much sugar wasn't good. We didn't drink pop too much when I was young. We drank juice most of the time.
We made our own butter at home, from our own cow, but mom still bought margarine. I know she used bacon grease, but she also used Crisco. Only peripherally related, one thing that I truly didn't understand was that she would buy canned potatoes (I don't even think such a thing is on the shelves anymore) sometimes, despite the fact that we grew hundreds of acres of potatoes and always had a cellar full of potatoes. The canned ones didn't taste good, either. While I was raising my son, I never had pop in the refrigerator. That was a once-in-awhile thing, like if we were on a driving vacation. I always had fruit drinks available instead.
Only answer I can think of is that the canned were quicker. I've had those and they are the worst canned thing ever, they just don't can well I guess.
I like my bacon pretty crisp so I wrap the slices in several sheets of paper towels and give it four minutes in the Microwave and let it sit for three minutes. The towels absorb the grease and the bacon is crisp when taken out of the towels.
When we went to Sam's Club today, they had turkey bacon, and it was about half the price of regular bacon; so we got some. It has almost no fat to it; so I wondered if maybe we should mix it with some regular bacon when we cook it; so it will have some grease to help it cook. Or, I can just use a little coconut oil, which is what I usually cook with. It also said it would take about a minute to cook it in the microwave. I am against microwave cooking for the most part; but since it is only going to be in there about a minute, and it is not something that I eat a lot of, I am going to try that. It seems like if the microwave will cook it that fast, it is not much worth heating up a pan to do it.
@Yvonne Smith "It seems like if the microwave will cook it that fast, it is not much worth heating up a pan to do it." Unless you have tasted a turkey roasted in a microwave, you will not begin to imagine the difference, white breast meat thoroughly cooked, but still juicy, not dry and hard to swallow like oven-roasted often is. That, and a medium-sized turkey, around 12 to 14 lbs., will be done to perfection in 70 to 90 minutes. All you need do is turn it over two or three times during the process. Why are you against microwave cooking of food? Frankl
I do not dispute that the taste of microwaved food is still totally awesome, and the appearance is downright beautiful compared to how something like broccoli looks after it has been boiled. However, microwave cooking destroys the phytonutrients in foods at the cellular level. This is (of course) one of those disputed things, where the mainstream opinion is that microwaved foods are fine, or even superior, to other foods. I have no problems with how anyone else wants to cook their foods, or what they want to think. However, for myself, I have stopped using the microwave except for a very few items, and try to lightly steam anything that I would have normally cooked in the microwave. If you look online, you can find a plethora of information, both pro and con, to microwave cooking. Here is one article that succinctly explains about the microwave destroying phyto-nutrients. http://www.naturalnews.com/039404_microwave_ovens_vitamins_nutrients.html
@Yvonne Smith Interesting article, and thank you for it. I cannot comment to the contrary regarding phytochemicals being affected by microwave energy more adversely than conventional heating, but, heat is heat. I expect, though, there are danged few phytochemicals in a turkey! Frank