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I’ve been working from home for a week now and I haven’t crossed a single thing off the list of “things I’ll be able to get done when I don’t have to go to school”. When I get into a routine I’ll have time to write some dissection guides and run some workshops, in the meantime the phone rings and I can answer it, the email doesn’t pile up all day and keep me up until all hours of the night and I can pick up and deliver all over town at a reasonable time of the day.
Today, for the first time, I even stopped for lunch. It was 3pm and the phone rang in the middle of it, but at least I sat down and ate something between breakfast and cheese-and-bic.
This afternoon I set out to pack an order for tomorrow, take the dog for a walk and be able to hang out a load of washing before sunset. Then, since I was in the shed anyway, I thought, “I’ll just cryovac that pluck in the fridge”.
So I did. And this is what happened:
The pluck expelled at least a cup of blood, lung goop and general grossness into the machine and all over the baseboards inside it. Between them, around them, under them – everywhere. Ugh.
If anyone from the abattoir is reading this, then this is the reason I complain when the plucks are ‘too big’. If anyone from the cryo rental company is reading this, don’t worry. I’ve cleaned it, disinfected it, dried it out and turned it off.
Ah, well. Order packed, cryovac cleaned from top to toe, dog walked to the bottom of the hill and back, washing still in the machine and it’s after dark. Cheese tastes better when it’s had a bit of time out of the fridge anyway.
At last, a reason to link to Not Quite Nigella!
Not Quite Nigella is part of my Secret Blog Business. Late at night, while Mr Vivi is getting ready to go to bed and I am waiting for him to get out of the bathroom, I sit and pretend to be shutting down my computer. What I’m really doing is catching up on my blog feeds and Not Quite Nigella has risen in the ranks to be one of the first folders I open to read.
Tonight, in honour of Australian Bacon Week (have you heard it’s Bacon Week?) I am making an original Not Quite Nigella recipe for dinner and writing about it as an excuse to spread the word about the fabulous NQN blog. She’s funny, she’s adventurous and she takes much better photographs than I do.
Tonight for dinner it’s NQN Cauliflower and Bacon Soup. Super easy to make and smells fantastic on the stove. I used a bacon stock cube and a chicken stock cube to make the stock, added some fresh nutmeg to the pot and some onion to the crumble topping. I also didn’t bother to blend it in the food processor because I don’t mind chunky soup and I didn’t want to do the extra washing up.
We’ll be having it with a glass of Squealing Pig sauvignon blanc.
Have you got a good bacon recipe, Vivsters?
Happy Australian Bacon Week to you! This week here at the Chop Shop it’s going to be all about the bacon.
Australian Bacon Week is an initiative of Australian Pork to promote home grown, home-smoked bacon and raise awareness about the importing of frozen pork products.
The statistics on the Australian Pork website are pretty staggering:
Imported pork products come from countries with heavily subsidised agricultural industries so you would think that they would be winning the price war, but the pork and smallgoods that we buy from our local Gympie butchers is the same price or cheaper than the imported product from the supermarket.
The winners of the awards for Australia’s best bacon have been announced – check out the website and see if there is a winning butcher near you.
So, be a Porkstar this week and bring home the bacon from a local supplier or, if you can’t get to the butcher, look for the pink Australian Pork logo on the package and wake up smelling the bacon that came from a pig that grew up near you.
