Entries Tagged 'Eating local' ↓

There’s something about the sound of that name “Wheeo”, doncha think? It came to mind today, watching my elder son hurtle down the slide at the waterpark – it’s a sound of exhilaration and anticipation, but there’s a delicious thrill of risk to it, too. At least the first time around, you don’t know how cold it’s going to be when all of a sudden you’re immersed.

It can be a little daunting when Twitter comes to life, but like splashing down on a hot day it’s relieving and exciting all at once. I first met Tammi of Tammi Tasting Terroir (and @tammois) when she’d come to Canberra for a conference related to her PhD (yeah, it’s about food). We’d planned to go out for a drink but the combination of my small children and her tight schedule made it too hard. Instead, she came to my house, the morning after the conference had finished.

We share a lot as it turns out. We are Serious Home Cooks, both completely obsessed with food and feeding people, and we both love reading and writing about food. We hit it off, and Tammi and her family recently invited us to spend New Year’s Eve at the country house of their friends Antonia and Mark, a couple of hours drive from here. Owen was in Melbourne with an old friend for NYE itself, but joined us after a couple of days.

The house itself was beautiful, the only drawback the sincerely expressed and repeated warnings about brown snakes. I’m not too thingy about snakes as a rule, but that’s because I live in the suburbs and never see any. So the idea of my rather silly 18 kilo toddler being bitten in a place which is out of mobile range, has no landline and is a good hour’s drive away from a hospital made me a big angsty. Fortunately Snake Education 101 from the four larger children seemed effective. The one snake that was spotted (yep, a brown one) was terrified off by Tammi’s husband Stuart’s desperate desire to kill it, by his stashing of sharp threatening spades near the scene of the spotting and by his general air of manly readiness.

For fear of brown snakes, no clothes were washed.

I mentioned that the house was beautiful, but it was also full of beautiful things – indigenous and contemporary art, wonderful books, rooms crammed with beautiful Turkish carpets, interesting found things, such as the beautiful bowl of nests which brought Gay Bilson to mind, and linen cupboards stuffed with super-soft old white damask sheets.

From the bedroom we stayed in.

We had a few friends around for a drink before Christmas and my friend Chris (an ex-chef) asked laughingly while she enjoyed a Rhubarb Fizz made by one of the other guests whether my friendships were self-selecting around food. I suppose it’s no stranger than others who share a common interest coming together; probably less so because food is so social. And while it’s true that most of my friends care about food and cooking, to most of them it’s not so deeply embedded as it is with Tammi and me. We could talk about food all day, interrupting that only to read about, make or eat food. And we both left Wheoo with new treasures jotted in our little notebooks – for me in particular, Tammi’s basil and garlic hollandaise which is so good that it has returned hollandaise to my inner list of Things Worth Eating.

The books I took for my holiday reading were Richard Olney’s Simple French Food, Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook, and Julian Barnes’ The Pedant in the Kitchen. I didn’t open any of them, as it happened, although Stuart read some of the Olney. Tammi had brought her own stash of books, so I read Lauren Schenone’s The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken and some of Barbara Santich’s Looking for Flavour instead. The owners of the house are also food nerds, and in addition to the supremely well-stocked kitchen, there was a bookcase of food and wine books. Whenever it wasn’t stuffed with food, the table looked like this:

I don’t always cook well with others (sounds like it should be on my school report), particularly in my own kitchen, but Tammi and I quickly settled into a rhythm of each preparing parts of the meal. The exception was my introduction to ravioli making, and there I was very much the student. In the week I’ve been home I’ve broken my pasta machine, bought a new one and read quite a bit of Marcella Hazan.

Despite the thousands of recipes in the house, mostly we both cook improvisationally. One of us would suggest a dish, the other come up with something sympatico to accompany it. Tammi’s described some of the yummies (with pictures) at On Cooking and Feasting, Merrily.

Here were some of the highlights that occurred before my poor little camera died:

Tammi embraced breadmaking at Wheeo. It meant we could stay in the house and not have to go anywhere and still eat proper bread. WIN

Pasture fed Columbooka T-Bones from my sister-in-law’s farm in Southern NSW. We shall not mention the little incident with the brazier. Stuart made a giant bowl of horseradish sauce so delicious we ate it all. That would have been at least half a cup each, but in our defence it was made with yoghurt rather than cream.

Tammi and I share a predisposition to frugality and a hatred of stingyness. The tomatoes were stuffed with crumbs made from one of Tammi’s loaves, herbs from the garden, olive oil and about 18 cloves of minced garlic.

We had no cream so Tammi infused some milk with herbs from the garden to make a delicious potato gratin to eat with the pork. Stuart’s home-cured olives were what really made it sing.

I unrolled a rolled boned forequarter of Wessex Saddleback Pork from Mountain Creek Farm and found some nice things to go with it. I love fennel with pork, so made Owen pull over on the way back from picking him up to join us. If you are going to pick herbs from the roadside, there are a few things to keep in mind – the less traffic the better, wash the spiders off (there were two) and if you’re in an unfamiliar place, check the goddam garden first. There’s no point foraging if it’s there to harvest.

We cooked the pork on horseradish leaves from the garden, and they became so deliciously luscious what with the pork fat, lemon, fennel and wine that we ended up slicing them finely to eat with the pork. I brought some horseradish home and planted it, so hopefully there’ll be a lot more of this in the future.

There were a great deal more veggies and salads that it may seem here, and considerably more wine, as it happened. This wasn’t wine, however, but the Rhubarb Fizz made by my friend Jem. It was supersweet, but a nip of gin balanced it up nicely.

It struck me thinking about it afterwards that Tammi and I cook together like musicians jamming – confident, mature, communicating with a glance, riffing off each other and then getting to feast too. Neither setting out to impress the other, but to make something that is impressive, something coherent, satisfying and enriching to the people we care about.

Since coming home I’ve finished the Julian Barnes book I took away and neglected (hmmm, in my best Marge Simpson voice. Despite long experience of sophisticated cooking he has remained a bloody kitchen pedant, and I’m no friend of them) and I’ve started the Olney (a proper book, with long complicated sentences).

My favourite food of all to make is a composed salad, a meal on a plate, heavy on the veg. It was the first food I made for Tammi, and I can’t think of a more perfect example of food guided by experience and taste rather than recipes. It is the joy of food that is never the same twice, the ingredients, company, location, mood, season, changing but never losing the heart-joy of placing on the table something that you are hopeful – and confident – will be enjoyed. Richard Olney is speaking here on the subject of such salads, and their endless variation, but I hope that his words are as true of these friendships born in front of the computer screen and cemented at the table –

… One could go on forever, and, in practice, one does.
Richard Olney Simple French Food

Tammi in the kitchen.

I’m really good at missing open days – I missed one at Mountain Creek Farm in early November, and I’ve always managed to be out of town or doing something else when Glenn na Meala has an Open Day. Glenn na Meala (which means “Valley of Honey” in Gaelic) is the farm that provides much of the produce at Choku Bai Jo, the farmers’ outlet shop in North Lyneham where we buy most of our fruit and veg (and Capra goat cheese, and Shangai Yulin tofu, and Li Shen mushrooms, and Homeleigh Grove olive oils – here’s a list of the producers they stock.)

So I thought I’d let locals know that the Pentony family who run the farm and shop are having an open day on this Saturday, 21 November from 4pm, which will have tasting, tours and talks by Dave Pentony and other local producers.

We were lucky enough to spend last Sunday afternoon there, as Owy plays on an indoor cricket team with Ben Pentony who put on a do for the team and the 7 young Japanese people who work at the farm on a farm stay system. (A three month stint during their 12 month working visa gives them the right to stay in Australia for another year; they work in the gardens and receive board, accommodation and fierce ping-pong tournaments.)

You couldn’t have a succesful time with farm stay workers unless you liked the life of having a bunch of people around; the Pentonys obviously do, with most of the travellers extending their time on the farm. Hideko Pentony, farm den mother, is Japanese too, and makes an effort to help the kids understand Australian culture – things like entertaining friends and home and not double-dipping! (Sadly I missed taking a picture of the girls all photographing the blokes washing up after lunch.)

The party was in the big packing and hanging out shed; you can see the poly tunnel greenhouses in the back of this photo:

I went for a wander down to the greenhouses (which increase water efficiency and reduce loss to pests and environmental factors).

It was stinking hot, well over 30 degrees and Dave warned me it was probably near 50 in the tunnels – but it was worth it to smell this much basil:

And all this too (I’ve labelled the photos if you enlarge the thumbnails; let me know which ones I’ve misidentified ):

Kids are made very welcome, and the several kids in attendance got A LOT of attention from the Japanese travellers. The farm is half way through their organic certifcation process (although they’ve been organic for a very long time) and there’s a feeling of safety that kids aren’t going to getting into any nasty chemicals when they go exploring:

(he was searching for a ping pong ball – you’ve never seen a 7 year old be more impressed with his new found ability to slam a shot through).

Back in the shed are the big sinks where all the produce for the shop and stalls at the EPIC and Southside Farmers’ Markets are triple washed. The salad mixes are spun dry in giant lingerie bags in washing machines – I saw the bags line drying when we got there and for a moment thought that the Japanese girls wore REALLY big pants ;)

We got to eat one of the property’s sheep, cooked for five hours to unbelievable tenderness. Fortunately there are two big barbeques in the shed so there were plenty of veggies too – and Ben worked in flash gastropubs in the UK for several years and made some beautiful salads, including a killer caprese.

That’s Ben in the orange shirt, and the back of his dad Dave. Owy isn’t pulling a face there, he’s got a mouth full of lamb which he’s pretending he didn’t snaffle. And here’s everybody else getting into it:

I would really recommend a visit to Glenn Na Meala. We are so lucky to have local, organic produce of this quality, and to have a family so committed to bringing good food to us outside the stoopermarkets.

And don’t miss giving the extremely congenial farm dog Rex a pat – he’ll be waiting for one:

How to get to Glenn na Meala:

The farm is about 20 minutes drive from Canberra; travel down the Barton highway to Hall, turn left onto Wallaroo Rd, after about 3.5 kms turn left onto Gooroomon Ponds Rd, follow for 2.5 kms, go past an equestrian centre with prancing horse statues on the right and the farm is on the left. Parking is limited, so try and find a friend to carpool with.

Okay, so this is another winery that really shouldn’t be on the list, but…

Our Man and I first came across Collector Wines at the Cafe in the House* annual goat BBQ. It went down very smoothly and we wanted to try it again just to make sure it wasn’t the siren song of roast goat that lured us to the second glass.

A quick phone call to winemaker Alex McKay confirmed Collector doesn’t have a cellar door.

“I’m concentrating on getting the wines right first,” he said (or something like that – can’t read my notes). In any case, you’ve gotta like someone who’s more focused on what ends up in your glass than worrying about all the extras. It’s a decision that carries through to the bottleshop floor – Collector produces only two wines, a reserve shiraz and the Marked Tree Red, which both King James and Captain Hooke** give props (…the Ali G eps do come in handy at times).

The wines are available across Canberra: Airport Market Cellars, Plonk at Fyshwick, Cox Kelly in Civic and Georges Liquor Stable in Philip, as well as some of the IGAs (Deakin, Ainslie , O’Connor, Lynham). Alex explained most stores have the 06 Marked Tree Red. The 07, a frost year, had a low yield and the 08 has just been released. According to Alex the 08 is closer to the style he’s chasing – a lighter shiraz that still packs a punch – a bit like a burgundy.

With a slight nod to symmetry, we picked our bottle of 06 Marked Tree Red from the Kitchen Cabinet in OPH for $28 and matched it with a big, juicy Angus steak. The wine was deep red, almost magenta in colour, with a hint of white pepper on the nose and lots of berry flavours – fruit with a touch of sweetness but a dry peppery finish. It’s soft, juicy and went down a little too easily if you’re eating out but since we were at home…

Cellar door or no cellar door, if the 06 is this good, I’m very keen to try to an 08. And who knows, maybe OMIC will crack open his moth collection wallet for a taste of the reserve.

*I always want to call it Cafe in da House – too many Ali G episodes I guess
**or should I say James Halliday and Huon Hooke both rated these wines highly

www.collectorwines.com.au

These posts are cross posted from Our Notional Capital, where Dame Pattie blogs with her partner, our man in Canberra. The progressive list of Canberra and region wineries is here.

Okay, let’s get the obvious question out of the way first. No, we didn’t get to try Tim Kirk’s fabled shiraz viognier. Yes, it was a little disappointing but hardly surprising given it’s considered by many to be the duck’s nuts of Canberra wines. In any event, there were plenty of other wines to taste including a sem sauv blanc, some shiraz, a couple of viogniers and even a young port taking its first baby steps.

Along with Helm and Lambert, Clonakilla (church meadow) is one of three wineries claiming to be the oldest in this region (and we’ll let them work this one out amongst themselves). Whatever the case, the Kirk family as been growing grapes and making wines for almost 40 years and happily this experience shows in the bottle. They’ve had plenty of time to get the shiraz viognier mix right too, having adopted the practice of adding a touch of viognier back in 1992, after Tim’s trip to the Rhone Valley the year before.

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The Australian Conservation Foundation has just released its From Paddock to Plate: Rethinking Food and Farming report. Along with lots of recommendations about how we should do food production in rural and peri-urban areas, it also contains a number of recommendations about food production in urban areas. For instance, it talks about food sensitive urban design, which includes how we might design new housing estates, but also, where urban planning calls for consolidation and medium-density housing, it might be useful to factor in community gardens, roof gardens and so on.

But this would surely require a change in the current approach of local councils and planning authorities. For example, a vibrant urban food production system directed at household self-provisioning would require some relaxation of current water restrictions. Here in Melbourne, water restrictions serve as a restriction on water use, rather than a restriction on water consumption, and water use for household provisioning rather than commercial profit is severely restricted.

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I wasn’t in the best mood for wine tasting the day we visited Brindabella Hills Winery. It was a bitter Canberra winter’s day and Our Man and I had a wide-ranging argument discussion about the best way to spend the afternoon.

Brindabella Hills was on our list but didn’t offer food, so he suggested taking along a picnic. I pointed to the level of the mercury cringing in the thermometer bulb and hastily threw a few items together, thinking that I’d be able to persuade him into going somewhere with tablecloths and waiters.

Upon arrival, however, things started looking better. I like parrots and when I spotted a small posse of Crimson Rosellas as we rolled up to the cellar door, I took it as a sign that the afternoon was about to improve.

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Strictly speaking Barton Estate shouldn’t be in the A2Z because it isn’t open to the public – I was thrown by a couple of web entries that suggested you could arrange tastings by appointment. Unfortunately, tastings aren’t offered but you can order the wines via the website (a word of warning, at the time of writing the wine list on the web is from 2005 but apparently the site is soon to be upgraded).

When we spoke to co-proprietor Julie Chitty she also suggested trying the Kingston Hotel bottle-o and Jim Murphy’s Airport Cellars for a limited selection and Braddon Cellars for a fuller range. We struck out with the Kingston Hotel and Braddon Cellars but we did find a few varieties on sale at Jim Murphy’s, all around the $16 mark and all from the 2003 vintage.

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I had only ever eaten improper truffle before this season (that is, flavoured truffle oil), but I have been making up for lost time. I had planned to make a rare restaurant visit for my birthday a few weeks ago, but Owen, I and our babysitter were all sick. The following weekend, I decided it would be wise to spend some money on a truffle as an alternative treat.

Black Perigord truffles are in season from late May to early August, although better from the middle part of that period because they need some decent frosts to mature. A co-op of local growers is selling local black truffles by the piece at the Farmer’s Market (Saturday mornings at the EPIC showgrounds in the north of Canberra). I got there early, but not horrifyingly so, and there was still plenty available. Considering that it was selling at $3000 a kilo, the upper end of the price for fresh Australian truffle, that might not be a big surprise.

That said, Reemski of I am Obsessed with Food found some fresh truffle in Sydney at $4896 a kilo. Simon Johnson stores are selling fresh truffle from Manjimup in WA at $2750 a kilo, but you need to pick it up from one of their stores; they recommend at least 15 grams per person. The info sheet handed out by the local co-op suggests a minimum entree serve per person of 3 grams, and a main course portion of 5 grams, but they’re restaurant portions, not homestyle ones. I bought 20 grams for $60, which came in a ziploc bag with a piece of kitchen paper.

The first thing I did was grab the jar of carnaroli rice I had ready, stuff the truffle in there and put some eggs from our hens on top to infuse for 48 hours. I’ve since found out that for optimal truffle love the jar should go in the fridge – even if it’s just rice and truffle – and there should be a peice of absorbent kitchen paper in there, replaced daily, to collect any moisture. Truffle, of course, being a fungus and no friend to moisture once harvested.

It was hard waiting, but I found opening the jar and regularly sniffing it helped. The scent was described to me by a friend last week as “like sex and puppies”. It’s a low, intensely savoury umami-ness – penetrating, earthy, full and deeply, deeply appealling. Even now, a couple of weeks later, I can still get a good snoutfull of the aroma from the rice.

Slicing truffle super thinly (or grating with a microplane) is wise because a greater surface is exposed to release the aroma. And truffles love fat, which helps the aroma linger. They are also great friends to eggs, mushrooms, pasta, risottos, chicken and the pale end of the root veg scale – see the local growers guide for more info.

Our first proper taste was truffled eggs for breakfast on the Monday morning. Mornings can be very long in this house, as we are usually woken very early by our youngest son and even though the Winter days are sunny and often quite pleasant, it’s uniformly dark and grimly mid-winterish at 5:30am . I don’t often make scrambled eggs and this time I did it in a bain marie, with just a spoonful of cream and the beaten eggs, and we ate it on some toasted sourdough.

Isn’t the colour amazing? We microplaned some truffle over the top – not a huge amount, less than one third of the truffle. One of the best things about eating truffle this way is that the shavings are right under your nose and the intensity of the aroma is very powerful. The dish is all about the texture of the egg and the aroma of the truffle – we agreed that you could not put too much truffle on scrambled egg.

The next dish I made was my masterchef fantasy soup using parsnip, celeriac and Jerusalem artichokes. It was very simple: sweat diced veg in butter and olive oil, add chicken stock and simmer, puree super fine, add a small amount of cream, season. I topped it with little truffle slivers and a drizzle of green new season local olive oil. It was great, but the truffle had by this time lost quite a lot of zing. It doesn’t have much to offer by way of texture, so to maximise the aroma (and value) it would be better to use it more quickly next time – even a couple of days makes a big difference. Owy didn’t love this, thinking that the subtlety of the truffle lost out to the Jerusalem artichoke.

I missed out on the final dish, a chicken and mushroom truffled pasta, which Owy made while I was down the coast for the weekend. He loved it, and is keen for a repeat. So am I.

I thought $60 was good value for the excitement and excellent meals we had with our truffle, and will certainly buy one again. Given the expense, I thought it might be a good idea to become a more savvy truffle purchaser so I found a particularly enjoyable way to find out more about them in a truffle and wine matching night at the local Mount Majura vineyard which happens to be a ten minute drive from home and next door to a trufferie. I wanted to get my snout into some really fresh truffle, so I could purchase more confidently, and to find out how I could take cooking with truffle it “to another level” with some good wine.

It was a little awkward arriving – on time, by myself – to find only two others there. But I was promptly handed a glass of the delicious 2008 Chardonnay which helped (they’d found out that week that the wine had acheived a gold medal at the 2009 Winewise Small Vignerons Awards). Gradually another twenty or so people arrived, most of whom seemed to know each other from the Canberra branch of Slow Food.

The evening began with a talk from Sherry McArdle-English, the owner of French Black Truffles of Canberra and a very charming and knowledgable presenter. She described the move to a farming life following her husband Gavan McArdle’s diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease and the process of finding the perfect crop. The local climate (blisteringly hot in Summer, plenty of Winter frost) and the limestone soil was perfect for black truffles.

Sherry had brought with her a jar of truffles harvested that day – about 200 grams/$400 worth in this jar:

She suggested that those who were unfamiliar with truffle should briefly smell, pause and repeat the process twice – we are somewhat hardwired to the scents we know by adulthood, and learning a new one can be a challenge for our system. (I’ve heard a dragonfruit grower from NT describe a similar process with getting to love that fruit – now my older son’s favourite.)

The first course was truffled cambembert, which had been split horizontally and infused with three layers of fine truffle slices for 24 hours, and unrefrigerated for the last 4 hours or so. It was great, although it could easily have been infused for 48 hours. Given how fricking cold parts of my house are, I would happily leave it unrefrigerated the entire time, but you may live in the tropics, who knows.

With it we tasted more of the 2008 Chardonnay and the buttery, golden 2003 Chardonnay – the greater complexity and weight of which made it clearly the better match.

The next three courses were prepared by local French born and trained Eric Menard, a chef and pastry chef who runs the Le Petit Furneau patisserie in Chapman in Canberra’s south.

It was extremely pleasant and fitting to have a lovely Frenchman banging on about the joys of eating truffle on Bastille day, particularly given the calibre of the dishes he offered. The first was a “Robuchon style mashed potatoes with truffle” – that is, a very fluid, loose puree.

With it we tasted a 2008 Riesling and a 2008 Pinot Gris. I preferred the buttery, passionfruit flavours of the Pinot Gris as a stand alone flavour, but the Riesling was the winner with the dish.

And how good was it?

Thanks to the lovely Karen, who I met that evening, for snapping that photo. Karen is an ex-wine marketer (if I’d known you could do a degree in wine marketing I don’t think I would have gone to law school after all) and a thoroughly charming person. I was lucky to be seated near her and to get the benefit of hearing a much more educted palate than mine discussing in an analytical way how the wines worked with the dishes.

I would show you a picture of the next course, a pan seared pork fillet with mushroom and truffle jus, but we got over excited and I didn’t pick up the camera until this stage of things:

That’s Karen.

The pork dish was just UNBELIEVABLY GOOD. Like so many magnificent dishes in the French tradition, it began simply with a bucket of good butter and eschallots, followed with mushrooms and reducing stock to make an unctuous sauce that was totally plate-lick worthy. I admit to eyeing off the remaining sauce smear on the plate of the chap next to me. Thank goodness I managed to not just snatch it up. I wanted to.

The wines with the pork fillet were a 2008 Pinot Noir and the winery’s flagship, a Dinny’s Block from 2004 (Dinny Killen was the original owner of the vineyard). Delicous as the Cabernet franc (69%), Merlot (20%) and Cabernet sauvignon (11%) blend is – and it’s a wonderful, mouth-filling wine – the lighter more minerally Pinot sat better with the pork.

The final dish came with instructions – served in a wine glass, we were to stir before eating so that the layers of flavour would meld. It was a rice pudding heavy with a vanilla-y creme anglais, topped with acidic Granny Smith apples caramelised in butter (no sugar) and topped with truffle.

It was a brilliant presentation of Chef Menard’s proposition that truffle can work well in any type of dish that properly balances creaminess/fattiness and acidity. The wines – a 2008 Rose and Woolshed Creek Sticky – were lovely, but irrelevant. It needed no accompaniment.

Four tasting plates and eight tasting samples of wine cost me $50, which I thought was extremely good value. I was satisfied that the truffle I’d purchased at the markets was very fresh and a fair price. The just-harvested truffle from the neighbouring farm did smell a little different – more minerally, with almost a menthol, Eucalyptusy note. Julia, the vineyard’s knowledgable marketing person who had led the friendly discussion amongst the guests of their wine preferences with each dish, said that the vineyard’s new wines being launched at the end of the month (pdf) had a similar flavour profile – must be that terroir thing.

I know some people slag off Canberra, and to them I say – my birthday is in the middle of our local truffle season. Sucks to be not me.

(Or Cath from The Canberra Cook, who’s also been playing with truffles.)

More information

“Understanding Truffles” at The Australian Truffle Grower’s Association stie is informative and has links to even more info.
McArdle’s truffles can be ordered through the Mart Deli at Fyshwick Markets. Order by Monday/Tuesday and pick up at the end of the week – 02 6295 3604.