Stand and Deliver!

I swear the apparent thematic relationship between these two photos – that just happen to be the last two taken on my phone – are coincidental. The belief that it was intentional is phallacious.

Perhaps the Blackadder fan within might want to make reference to an irony relating to a thingy, but I just want to proudly say these rather small carrots, grown in the backyard, had a phenomenal amount of flavour!

Meanwhile, if I were to invite you to try a length of my stiff, fat, Italian salami, at least consider the offer before you slap my face. Because I did just spend a day helping insert a pile of pork flesh into sheep intestine. This was the end of the day’s work (I only turned the handle on the mincer to fill them – didn’t do any of the hard work required to prepare the meat up to that point.)

And before you shudder, repulsed, like some people have been known to when an order of pork belly has hit the table (until you point out that had it been sliced thinly in a different direction and friend instead of baked, they could safely refer to it as ‘bacon’ and have it with eggs, as they always have!) I’d prefer you approach me with that same air of smug superiority as you do pontificating about foods and customs of third world indigenes that – although you’d never confess this bit – you only found out about five minutes ago on-line, or watching the Documentary Channel, or by dating someone ‘really hot and exotic’. As a southern Italian, there was a time when this would have constituted a third world food and custom. The smug superiority is slightly less annoying than the contempt and disdain that is more frequently held for second generation non-anglo Australians who somehow ‘aren’t Aussie’ (or ‘really hot and exotic’) enough.

This is the season of year when, traditionally, my people would slaughter a pig and use every single scrap of it in order to survive winter. In the old country. Back then. Over here, we used to refer to it as ‘salami season’ but I no longer am able because someone always miss-hears it as ‘tsunami season’ and wonders what the hell I’m on about.

Although this has kind of almost sort of changed since, about a week ago, that cat in the hat cooked a pig’s head on Masterchef. So it’s almost okay to eat ‘soul food’. Except – as my father would point out, were he still around – it’ll be far more expensive to buy now that l’Australiani have found out about it!

Oh, and by the way: if god didn’t want us to eat animals, why did he make them out of meat?