It was the last night of vacation, and I wanted to make something special before returning to the relentless excitement of newspaper work.

I picked up a boneless leg of lamb at Costco — at $6.49 a pound, the price is excellent — and decided to make it with grainy mustard, rosemary and thyme, and roasted inside a shell of salt (held together with whipped egg whites) that was perfumed with lavender from our garden.

It's an impressive presentation when you crack open the baked salt shell, and the meat was absolutely delicious. But a little piece of me was annoyed.

That boneless leg of lamb had a thick cap of fat on it, with additional large veins of fat running through the meat. All that fat would have tantalizingly melted and moistened the meat if I had cooked it, say, on a slowly rotating spit over a wood fire.

But I was roasting it inside a shell of salt (whip the egg whites to stiff peaks before folding them into the coarse salt and adding the lavender), so that meant cutting off the fat.

I cut it off, and I cut it off and I cut it off.

And then I weighed it, because I had cut off so much of it I began to wonder how much I had removed.

It was a little more than 1 pound, 5 ounces of fat. That is almost a quarter of the 5½ pound leg that I had bought. Which is to say I tossed $8.50 into the garbage can. It hurt when I did that.

I suppose I could have saved the fat and used it to cook potatoes, but honestly that only occurred to me right now. Also, who needs that many lamb-scented potatoes?

The high price of wasted food has been on my mind lately, ever since I went shopping for meat before Christmas. I wanted something nice. I wanted steak.

I headed to one of the best-known butcher shops in town and had to catch my breath for a minute once I saw their prices.

It had been months since I had bought a steak to cook, maybe a year. And it's possible that the store had bumped up the prices in anticipation of people wanting steak for Christmas or Christmas Eve.

At any rate, I was surprised by the prices. New York strip, which is my favorite cut, was something like $27 a pound (I didn't take notes, so I'm not certain of the price, but it was in that neighborhood). Porterhouse — the King of Steaks — was $21 a pound.

I found that hilarious.

Porterhouse is a New York strip steak and a filet mignon in one, separated by a bone.

So a strip steak by itself is $27 a pound, but a strip steak and a filet mignon — the most expensive cut there is — is $21 a pound. It's true that you don't eat the bone, but it's fairly light, and it also adds flavor.

This particular butcher shop does not distinguish between grades on its signs, so it is possible that the New York strip was prime and the porterhouse was choice, or even select. But I don't think they sell select meat, and choice porterhouse should not be that much less expensive than prime strip.

I was tempted by the porterhouse for the humor of it all, but I ended up getting the ribeye. Ribeyes are more tender than strip steaks, and have more marbling, which means more flavor, but also more fat. Because they are considered more desirable, they are usually more expensive than strip steaks, but these were $18 or $19 a pound.

I got two.

They looked like strip steaks. Their texture was like strip steaks. They tasted like strip steaks, but not very good ones.

Maybe they were having a bad day at the butcher shop. If they price a porterhouse so much less than a strip, maybe they don't know the difference between strip and ribeye.

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