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Bring home the bacon: Cauliflower and Bacon Soup

bacon stock cubes
Cubism - bacon style

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?

Miss Vivi

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Bring home the bacon: Australian Bacon Week

Thank you for shopping here butchers bag
This is the bag I brought home the bacon in - I can still smell the smokey goodness

 

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:

  • over 70% of smallgoods in Australia are made from imported pork
  • 65% of bacon sold in Australia is made from imported pork
  • $8.5 million worth of pork is imported into Australia every week

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.

Miss Vivi