The tale of the lork with footnotes about the Billa

It began one lovely Venice day when Fi and I decided to do a bulk shop at our local supermercato the Billa. The Billa itself is another story in learning Italian supermarket etiquette - our first trip we were a bit jet lagged and dazed from work so spent about an hour there picking up things and putting them down trying to find food to cook for a dinner we had planned that night with the other girls at our place. We happily got to the counter and found out you have to barcode your fruit and vegies yourself! With numerous cranky Italians stacked behind us I ran back to barcode them. Silly touriste I'm sure they were saying!!! I already knew they didn't pack your bags for you so we were up to speed on that, but they scan so fast so we quickly fell behind, got quite flustered and just shoved everything in to bags with many locals secretly laughing at us.

Our next trip we were ultra prepared - we had our granny trolley for bringing all our groceries home in and we even found the set spot where you store them while you shop. We bought numerous types of meat including what appeared to be a wonderful lamb leg roast for only 4 euro! We went a bit crazy with the shopping and filled our trolley to overflowing, so we grabbed a random box and filled that to.

We were so proud of ourselves for progressing to 'locals' until we started wheeling our trolley and realised that at times one of its wheels decides to go wobbly and almost fall off! That was relatively ok, and then we got to our first of many bridges. Our first theory was just to drag it up as that's what a lot of people do. It was quite heavy and that didn't seem to work (plus with all the bumping we were a bit worried about the eggs!). So we tried me lifting the bottom and holding the box in one hand while Fi carried the top (as the locals seem to do with prams). Great theory but then our trolley decided to tip and almost spill everything out! Needless to say we made it home eventually and are now pros at the whole process.

So, back to the lork. Yesterday we decided we were going to have a lovely roast for dinner with some potatoes and salad and were excited all day about our planned meal. Arriving home Fi pulled out the roast and said, that doesn't really look like lamb. I replied, but we picked it up in the meat part that had the little sheep pictures (very strange but they have silhouettes of the different animals, handy for us foreigners apparently...). Fi couldn't figure out what part of the lamb it would have come from as it was pretty big, we decided perhaps they have big sheep in Italy! It had rosemary on it so we decided it was probably lamb even though it didn't look it. We tried deciphering the label but all it said was roast in the oven and cut fresh at this market - very handy. So we gave it a go and pondered what it might be. We knew it wasn't chicken or beef and wished we had Fi's husband with us as he used to export meat. That left lamb or pork (or donkey but we didn't want to contemplate that possibility) hence we ended up deciding it must be pamb or lork and so emerged the lork....Anyway a short time later it was done, looking rather tasty but still a bit ambiguous - it did have crunchy pork crackling-like edges and after a few tastes we decided it was definitely pork... we think. And so ended a very entertaining evening experimenting with cooking in Italy and the invention of a new meat called lork.