The title of the post is what small brutish British children being brought up in their upper class nurseries and boarding schools would shout when presented with bacon.
The reason I am writing about that is that the Spaceship has been working with pork this week. Mrs Spaceship ordered a half pig from one of the local farmers recently, and spent Saturday down at the local abattoir making sausages and packaging our half of the beast in question.
Eating meat has some conundrums, which for me are: "what the hell am I actually eating, and did the animal suffer?"
The local abattoir is a very small affair that does one beast at a time. So the animal comes with the farmer, without being stressed, and then is dispatched, and butchered on an individual basis, with the local butcher, and the people who are taking the meat, so you know what you are getting - bio grass fed local produce.
Mrs Spaceship was told that when these local beasts raised on grass outdoors go the main abattoir, it turned out that the staff in the main abattoir would get bribed up to a thousand Swiss francs to swap the good beast for a factory one by the local retail butchers. So the Boucherie de Molard, one of the best in Geneva, now sends all its beasts to the small local one here to make sure that there is no substitution. (Something that apparently is obvious to a farmer, that might not be obvious to the layman, it seems.)
Mrs Spaceship came back with some of the initial produce last night, and as today dawned sunny and pleasant, we decided to do the first barbecue of the year, which is not bad for the 31st of January.
Here is the barbecue lighting up:
I decided to cook not just with charcoal, but also with cuttings off the local grapevines, which give a lovely smokey flavour. Just to finish it, I added some rosemary and laurel leaves. The sausages are made yesterday.
And they cooked up just fine, thank you.
Great way to have a Sunday lunch. Wonderful to be standing in the winter sun, and cooking outdoors.
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