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.
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.
I’ve joined Pinterest and I’m having a fabulous time! At first I was a bit sceptical about how it is used, but I signed up anyway just to give it a try.
I’ve decided to use it as a place to gather really good anatomy images, experiment ideas and other science images for you to refer to.
You know how frustrating it is when someone takes your work and presents it without giving you any credit, so please be courteous and credit the artists and websites if you use the images in the classroom. I have tried to link all the images back to their original websites so you can check out any copyright information they have and use the images appropriately.
I hope it’s useful to you and you find some fun there too. Feel free to point me in the direction of good stuff to share with other labbies. I’ll count it as an entry in the t-shirt competition if you do it before Easter.
We live in the country. Our property is surrounded by beef, dairy, macadamia, banana, deer and small crops farms. Slowly but surely these farms are dwindling in size and variety as town moves out and the career farmers move on. A local abattoir has recently closed and properties running a few pigs and cattle are now left without a nearby facility to have them slaughtered for their family meat. Their choice, now, is to pay to have them transported over a longer distance to another abattoir, hire an on-farm butcher to come and do the job on the property or not bother growing their own meat.
If I hadn’t moved to Gympie Dissection Connection would not exist. That’s no exaggeration. Gympie is in the perfect geographical position to get good quality stock, get it packaged and get it on the road – and this is where I met Mr Vivi ♥ The closure of small and medium sized abattoirs threatens our ability to source good specimens for you. You know how difficult it is to get stock out of the really big export abattoirs and that’s because they are under much more pressure to produce more meat in less time in order to remain viable as a business.
Since I started the business we have been buying almost all of our meat from local butchers and I can tell you the quality is head and shoulders above the meat I used to buy at the big supermarkets. Home smoked bacon and ham, handmade sausages, t-bones from a beast that came from a local farm that the butcher could give me directions to if I wanted to visit, duck dressed at the abattoir and cooked in my kitchen on the same day – there’s nothing quite like it. And the value for money at the butcher is incredible. We often buy a quarter of a beast or an entire pig and share it with another family. Where else are you going to get Black Angus beef t-bones or free range shoulder ham on the bone for about $6.00/kg?
When you buy specimens from Dissection Connection you are keeping countless numbers of families afloat. The meat industry supports Mr Vivi and I, the growers, the butchers, truck drivers, slaughtermen, admin staff, cleaners, electricians, plumbers, engineers and even the public servants that regulate the industry – just to name a few.
Abattoirs keep small towns alive. They provide full time employment, apprenticeships and traineeships for people that would otherwise have to move to the city. They bring people to regional towns that would otherwise not be able to grow and thrive. And they keep you in meat for the barbecue.
Every family needs a farmer. Every family. When you buy specimens from us you are are buying 100% home grown Australian produce – not specimens chemically treated and imported from America. Well done you! Now – how about going one step further and grabbing some meat from the local butcher and having a barbecue with your mates this weekend?
