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Cook the food in butter, then add some cream.

We were driving back from the Lort Smith animal hospital this morning, along Mt Alexander Road, when we saw a sign that made us pull over:

WOW Bacon only $9.00 for 2.6kg

We went in. It was an almost expired food sort of place, with loads of cool stuff. I picked up some honey mustard cranberry condiment for 80 cents, some lime flavoured soft drink called Frenzy (which I think is funny, because it’s the name of Alfred Hitchcock’s only experiment in gore, which snobby film critics like to forget ever happened) and, best of all, a couple of large camemberts for two bucks each. Oh, and some bacon, of course, which was good quality stuff from Castlemaine, in separate sealed packs inside a cardboard box, which’ll go straight in the freezer. I make bacon myself, but that’s for eating. This bacon will be for cooking, for making baked beans and such.

Then, as we were leaving, I saw the bin. It was a freegan’s wet dream:

Yes, it was entirely filled with bacon.

I’ve been very lazy this Christmas. Today I’m going to brine the turkey, and tomorrow I will cook it. But I haven’t made anything else. Compare this to last year, when I cured and smoked ten kilograms of pigs’ leg as well as smoked a turkey.

I fully intended to make another (smaller) ham this year, but before I realised it was December 18, and it takes at least seven days to properly cure a ham in brine. So that’s just poor time management (awareness?). Sadly, I lacked the willpower to forgo a ham entirely, and bought a tiny little on-the-bone number for about $25, just to tide us over until after Christmas, when I’ll go shopping for post-Christmas ham bargains. Woohoo!

I had other big plans. I was going to make panettone this year. But again, it’s way too late.

I only started eating panettone a couple of years ago. We’ve always bought them fairly randomly, usually whatever looked good at Piedemonte’s, generally with fruit or chocolate fillings, or even, one year, a solid chocolate coating. One year Dora the cat went crazy for panettone we’d brought home, but ever since she’s refused to touch them. So I don’t know what was in that panettone that the rest lack.

This year I went with a plain Perugina Pandoro (like a panettone without the fruit, so kind of like a brioche), which my friend Placido at the Preston Market recommended. I think that without the other flavourings you get to appreciate the texture and taste of the cake better. I guess the acid test for me is that Luffy still likes it, and he’s usually unreceptive to plain baked goods. But then he tends to like anything Italian, from parmesan reggiano to cannoli.

After Christmas is when you get the deals, of course, and even stale panettone makes a good bread-and-butter pudding. Or toasted with coffee for breakfast, maybe with berries and marscapone cheese. There’s just something magical about eating cake for breakfast, and while I’d be happy to eat panettone year-round, I guess it makes Christmas a little more fun.