Bless them all. The little one I bought this week, the big one about six months ago. We don’t bother to put them away. They just live on the hotplates and get used every day.

I found a couple of other treasures today -

CALL 19 10 10 Block mounted WWI US Food Administration Poster!!!!

CALL 19 10 10 Dr Oetker aluminium bundt pudding steamer !!!!

Other recent treasures include all our cutlery (threw what we had out, as the new stuff was much nicer) and most of our crockery.

(If you think that was just some crazy set up toddler diving shot, check here - and no, we weren’t on a road.)

There was lots of good food and more wine than was really necessary. And there was my sister Kelly heading out to see if she could shoot a bunny, back within the hour bearing a wild hare. She is an art teacher and decided to get all Dutch on our ass:

Then Anne dressed the hare while we (and the kids) looked on. We hung the hare for a day in the farm’s old “meat room”, and brought it back home on ice. We were a bit unsure about hanging it here - it’s not exactly a European climate, and we’d already gutted it. Fortunately Stephanie Alexander’s Cooks Companion had the answer - as it almost always does - and it was only necessary to rest it in the fridge for a few days.

I jointed it and rubbed the carcass with olive oil and it’s in the fridge on a rack, covered with muslin. I’ll cook it up tomorrow for the extended family on Friday, but we’ll need something else too as one hare won’t feed all of us.

We didn’t keep the offal because my sister was afraid of hydatids, but she’s not really an offal fancier and I wish I’d kept the liver. I’m thinking a braise with thyme, red wine, prunes, pepper and maybe a tiny bit of bitter chocolate. Your suggestions and expertise are very welcome in comments.

There’s a couple of photos over the fold (gore warning), and a lot more both photos and gore at my flickr.

I’d just like to say at this point that I hope nobody confuses my love of Christmas pudding with love for the festive season or even Christmas dinner. For me, the only good thing about Christmas is the pudding and it has to be perfect. This one is. It’s based on Stephanie Alexander’s mum’s recipe, AKA Emily Bell’s Christmas Pudding. However, over time I’ve worked in some important enhancements. Mine is more alcoholic and has nuts and treats in it. Best of all, I’ve learned how to do it vegetarian, which is helpful if you want to show Christmas love to people who object to consuming beef fat with their fruit.

Make it now so the flavour develops over the coming weeks. It takes some planning, so I’ve laid it out in stages - both vego and suet versions are included. The given quantities make two puddings, each of which furnishes about eight slices. You can do the math, because there are families in which eight slices will go a long way, but mine is not one of them. Just halve or double, depending on your pudding needs.

Necessary accoutrements

1 very large basin (and room for it in the fridge), two full-sized pudding basins or four little ones (see pic below) a stock pot or pressure cooker pot, a trivet or a round cake rack, foil, baking paper, string, a food processor with a grater attachment. Pudding basins don’t cost any more than $15 each and are worth it because they are pretty for give away puddings or can be reused at home. You can also use calico, which is cheaper, and I’ll tell you how, but the puddings don’t keep so well.

If you are not vegetarian or vegan, go to a proper butcher: ask them to put aside some beef suet (you cannot use suet mix, it won’t work as it’s got stuff added and the proportions don’t hold). You need to order proper suet. Ask for about a kilo - it’s really cheap and you’ll need more than you think.

Allow at least a weekend to do this: the mixture soaks for two full days and it takes six hours to cook each pudding. So choose a weekend when you’re happy to stay home and guard the fridge and the stove.

Now you are ready.

Ingredients

• Shortening: at least 500g suet OR 360 grams of vegetable shortening, cooking margarine or unsalted butter
• Dry ingredients: 180g plain flour, 180g fresh white breadcrumbs (not dried ones), 180g dark brown sugar, 1/4 teaspoon of salt.
• Fruit: 900 grams in combinations that please you. The original recipe calls for 360g seedless raisins, 360g currants and 180g sultanas. I prefer to reduce the raisins in favour of extra currants and other additions. You could add some dried apricots, apples or figs, just make sure you keep the weight up to 900g. I warn thee, fruit from the co-op will have far too many seeds and sticks in it, so it’s best avoided.
• Liquids: 4 big eggs, 600 ml milk (or soy milk), 150ml brandy, at least 1/4 cup of vodka (the original recipe is far too dainty in the alcohol stakes and calls for extra milk to make the mixture wet. I added extra vodka, with pleasing results). Note, you need more than 150 mls of brandy as it’s necessary for serving.
• Special magic additions: 125g candied peel and/or crystallised ginger, 180g (very) roughly chopped hazelnuts or almonds, around 125g of glace cherries if that’s what you are into. Again, whatever you choose to substitute, make sure it weighs about 580g. Also, grated zest of a lemon (or two if you don’t add peel) and a half a nutmeg grated (about two teaspoons of ground nutmeg). You can add allspice and cinnamon if you love them as I do.

Assemblage

Dead easy, except for managing the shortening. If you are a vegetarian shortening is no big deal. Just stick it in the freezer then grate it (don’t bother rubbing it into the flour).

If you are doing it the traditional way, with beef suet, it gets messy, but it’s worth it for flavour, holding quality and keeping ability. Suet is the fat that forms between layers of skin and muscle and comes with a membranous layer. Peel that off, and take the lumps you’ve got left (without any bits that are pink or gristly) and put them through your food processor’s grater blades or sit there for hours hand grating (and grating your hand). I know I’m not exactly selling the process, but do persevere! Keep the suet loose. It’s naturally soft, so if you pack it into the grater it sticks together. Starting with the suet very cold or frozen helps. Do try to avoid spraying it around the kitchen as it’s smeary and hard to clean up. Once you’ve got a nice fluffy lump of the stuff weigh it. You can stop grating when you get to 360 grams.

Take the shortening and everything else and chuck it in the bowl and stir until you have a big sloppy mess. It will be quite wet. Stick it in the fridge and ignore it for one day. Then get it out, stir it and taste a little bit. If you think it needs more spice, add it. Likewise brandy and vodka. Then refrigerate it for one more day.

To cook

Prepare your basins. Invert the basin onto baking paper. Draw a line around the bowl, and then cut out a nice little circle. Butter the dishes. Divide the pudding mixture evenly between the bowls and level off the surface. Butter the nice little baking paper circle and lay it butter side down on the pudding. Then get tinfoil and put two layers over the top of the bowl so it covers the sides at least 1/3 of the way down. Get a rubber band to hold it in place and tie it with heaps of string (the rubber band won’t stand up to the cooking, but it will help you get the string tight).

If you’ve decided not to use a basin, get two big pieces of calico, about 1 metre square, and boil them. While they are steaming hot lay them down on a scrupulously clean bench and chuck a big handful of flour in the middle. Smooth the flour out to make a circle. That will form a gluey coating that will protect the pud from the elements. Put half the pudding mix in the middle and pull the corners together. Use rubber bands to pull the top of the pudding into the characteristic pudding shape - you want as little room as possible between the top of the pudding and the rubber band and you want the floured bits to go all the way over the pudding. It’s tricky, so redo it if you need to. Tie long lengths of string around the top.

To cook them, get your biggest, tallest pot(s). If you are using a basin, put a trivet or cake rack in the bottom and sit the bowl down on that. Pour water in so it comes 2/3 the way up the sides of the bowl. If you are using a cloth tie the string on the handle of a wooden spoon and balance the spoon on the top of the pot so the pudding is suspended in the water. Whichever method you use, cover them, bring them to a boil and keep them going for six hours, topping up the water often. Bits of suet or butter will leach out into the cooking water, just ignore. DO NOT GO OUT, we don’t want the firemen coming and destroying the puddings.

After cooking and cooling the foil on top of the basins will have gone all grey and horrid so replace it (an opportunity to smell the puds). If you’ve used a cloth, fan the fabric out so the top dries over a couple of days and keep the pudding hanging somewhere. Basin puddings keep for at least a year in the cupboard or the fridge (hah!). Cloth puddings can develop mould because this mix is wetter than you’d usually use so watch them, keep them in the fridge and eat them within a few months.

To eat

On Christmas Day boil it for another 2 hours, using the same arrangements. To serve invert the bowl (or peel off the cloth), and you will have something that looks rather like this:

But before you eat it, you must flame it with brandy. To do that, get a big old tablespoon and fill it with brandy (remember, I told you that more than 150ml is required). Hold the spoon over the pudding and use a lighter to warm the bottom of the spoon until you see heat rising from the brandy, then flick the flame over the edge of the spoon so you get a blue flame. Pour the whole shebang over the pudding. Kids and adults are invariably delighted to see this:

After you’ve done that three or four times, as Zoe and Owen did for this picture in 2007, you are ready to eat. You can use cream or make proper vanilla bean custard or ice cream or brandy sauce, or serve it with hard sauce (which is overkill for such a rich pudding). One of my best moments was eating it with diet carton custard. Whatever you accompany it with, enjoy.

And here’s to you Ducky - a project for when you are feeling a bit better.

In the segment, Mackenzie often talks to producers and other food industry people, but the program also looks at how communities, schools and other organisations are involved with food.

Today’s “Food on Friday”was on the subject of thrifty eating, and featured Stephanie Alexander who discussed her Kitchen Garden Foundation project, what she fed her kids and the many benefits of eating from large shared dishes at the table. The other interviewee was Pam Batten, President of the Country Women’s Association in WA. Her organisation’s cookbook, The CWA Cookery Book and Household Hints, has been in print since 1936.

The two previous programs - on farming rabbits (wild and farmed, breeding to size for restaurants, recipes from Sydney’s Bécasse) and heirloom beetroots can still be downloaded.

The image is from the Old Parliament House site via Philanthroparty - I struggled to find any more information about it. And as I’m mentioning OPH, do yourself a favour and check out Canberra House, an absolutely brilliant site on modernist architecture here in Canberra written by Martin Miles who looks after the OPH site.

However, sometimes anxiety about hygiene just goes a bit far. I happen to know, for instance, that some early childhood educators refrain from using toilet rolls in kiddy craft, on the basis that they are a hygiene risk (I hasten to add that sensible people have concluded that nobody has yet died from their use, and that they are a worthy addition to the craft table). But, in a similar vein, comes a concept which a colleague tells me was reported on the ABC’s New Inventors last night.

It’s a shield that goes over the cake, and stops children’s germs falling on the icing as they blow their candles out.

Because there was no picture on the ABC site, I googled and found a US patented example.

So, an open post about hygiene standards, the lack thereof, and other people’s ridiculous pernicketiness. Fire away!

I have just read Gina Mallet’s book Last Chance to Eat, a book that claims cookery is dying, being killed by industrialised food production and nutritionist fear-mongering. It is a bad book.

Many food writers have had a privileged upbringing (like me, to a point). Some can write about it in a way that’s not only interesting, but graceful - say, MFK Fisher. Part of what makes her writing graceful and interesting is the clarity of her analytical intelligence. Gina Mallet does not share this virtue. She is just up herself.

Mallet is exceptionally good at one thing, which is is describing the taste of something in terms of something else. I wonder whether my own deeply felt failing at describing the taste of things is what makes her gift in that area shine so bright for me? Regardless, Mallet can describe the physical sensations of taste with a rare and precise clarity - a sense when I read that that, yes, I wish I could have made it sound so abundantly obvious.

It is the only kind of generosity in her writing. Writing about food that lacks generosity is a crime equal to McDonalds, as far as I’m concerned, because lack of generosity is a key sign of a bad host. If someone is writing about gastronomy and the logical fantasy about sitting at their table is a horror, then I’m out. I imagine the dinner conversation would range from the whine:

“Scrambled eggs are an ideal fast food: they are made in a couple of minutes and go with anything - rösti potatoes are particularly good. But who, other than me, makes them any more?. I don’t think it’s just that eggs have been the subject of a (false) health scare in the past 30 years, but rather that scrambled eggs demand a level of attention that fewer and fewer people want to spend on preparing food.” (p 43)

to the fatuous:

“Exactly why a Dover sole tastes so special, why its texture too is unique, is a puzzle. The firm flesh and the unvarying taste compared to other flatfish can only be due to the sole’s character. Unlike the indecisive flounder, the sole is focused and purposeful.” (p 224)

It’s easy to read a book of 200 plus pages and pick out a couple of dreadful sentences, but it needn’t be.

I wonder that Mallet can write like this, and remain immune to the great agrarian romance of authentic eating recent years.  In fact she is enthusiastic about the potential of genetically modified foods and entirely artificial foods, as these extracts from her blog show -

Scientists already can create almost every flavour, taste extant in a test tube.

The Nobel for chemistry has gone the discoverers of the green fluorescent protein (GFP) which allows biochemists to track the cell’s machinery at work. Great for medicine - perhaps great for food too. Imagine glowfood on the plate, irridescent green marbling of meat , striped green carrots, the yukon gold speckled with green glow…

The industrialisation of food and our alienation from food production is a fascinating topic, and there is much interesting writing - and activism - in the area. This book, however, is a sentimental whinge.

If you think that’s a little harsh, you can read this more reasoned review of the book by Barbara Santich and Mallet’s response: 

(Gina Mallet, Last Chance to Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World (Milson’s
Point, NSW: Random House Australia, 2004), pp. 236 plus index.

The doom-laden title demands immediate attention; who among us has not, at some stage, bemoaned the lack of flavour in tomatoes and peaches, the blandness of most Australian cheddar, the vapidity of characterless chicken breasts? Not that Gina Mallet gives any answers or any cause for optimism in this book, whose message seems to be that things ain’t what they used to be and we’d better enjoy what we can now, because they will only get worse. Her conclusion is that “unless consumers stick up for taste, there won’t be any” (p. 218).

According to the back cover, Last Chance to Eat is a “provocative and evocative account of the fate of food.” Certainly, the author has had plenty of wonderful food experiences to evoke and writes about them with verve and humour, for example, Dover sole at a birthday lunch at a Parisian brasserie, a properly aged porterhouse at a traditional New York steakhouse. But provocative? Pessimistic would be a better description. Perhaps this is an apt analogy for “the fate of taste,” but I would have found this book more provocative and more challenging if it recognised that the past is passé and directed its focus towards what can be done in the present to affect the future, and what we, as eaters, might do to “stick up for taste.” Instead, the epilogue, set some 50 years in the future, assumes that we simply continued to accept what we were given and, like characters in a Greek tragedy, did nothing to change the fate of taste.

Nevertheless, the book describes clearly and candidly the changes that have occurred in food production and processing practices and the reasons for these changes (essentially, health, hygiene, economics and politics). Mallet explains why steak and kidney pie has become steak and mushroom pie, why the number of different varieties of apple has diminished, why hydroponic tomatoes might be better than organic ones. Writing in a strong and authoritative voice, she is firm in her opinions, as when she states that Béchamel and Velouté are really the only worthy sauce accompaniments to fish (p. 216). In her discussions researchers and scientists are not spared, usually with good reason, for example, the scientists who decreed wood unhygienic and recommended plastic chopping boards; it was later discovered that wood has natural anti-bacterial properties (p. 82).

She can be equally scathing about the FDA, which decreed that children should not lick the bowl and beaters when raw eggs have been used in the cake batter (p. 59) and supermarkets that “don’t listen to customers … but buy the apples that make the best profit” (p. 160).

It is not difficult to agree with Mallet’s arguments and to be swayed by her sentiments. Yet, persuasive as the book is, it has a number of serious flaws that cast doubt on its probity and ultimate worth. One of these is its reliance, especially in the chapter on fish, on a limited selection of resources. I can accept that Bill Gerencer is very knowledgeable about fish and the fishing industry, but I would have expected a reputable writer to corroborate his information by referring to other sources. Bill might be correct when he says that shrimp are soaked in sodium-tripolyphosphate to plump them up before freezing, but surely this could have been confirmed by other industry or government sources (I’m sure Jeffrey Steingarten would have!).

The second serious flaw is the number of factual errors. A prestigious publisher such as Random House presumably employs skilled editors and fact-checkers, so how can it happen that Carême is credited with creating a dish called Chevreuse de perdreaux (p. 33) when the great chef actually named this masterpiece Chartreuse de perdreaux. Or that the chump chop is described as coming from the neck (p. 136), when, according to the English (and Australian) system, the chump is situated between the leg and the loin. Or that it states categorically “sugar is more fattening than fat” (p. 200); depending on how much of each you eat, this might be valid, but weight for weight fat contains more kilojoules than sugar. Finally, I have doubts about a recipe in which 2-3 cm potato cubes are boiled for 30 minutes and then cooked for another 40 minutes in a 190° oven.

Third, I wonder about omissions. Surely, in a discussion of modern slaughtering and meat processing practices and the risks of contamination by E. coli it would have been pertinent to mention Eric Schlosser’s recent exposé of the American meat industry in Fast Food Nation (2001).

The idea behind Last Chance to Eat is admirable. It is disappointing to me that a book that promised so much did not live up to expectations.

Mallet’s reply:

To the editor,

Flattered as I am to be reviewed in your April 2006 newsletter, I must point out that Last Chance to Eat: the Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World is not an academic book but a personal take on the state of our diet.

The personal interpretation of food, the sensual intermingling of food with people, events, and emotions, is a literary tradition—I refer to Elizabeth David, MFK Fisher, Sybille Bedford and Colette.

How such a book is received depends entirely on whether the reader goes along with the author rather than on any parsing of the “facts.” Obviously Barbara Santich, your reviewer, didn’t go along with my story of food. Fair enough. But to criticize a book like mine for something that’s not in it strikes me as misleading.

I chose information relevant to me, just the way Brillat Savarin, Elizabeth David, MFK Fisher did. I make and they made no pretence about being omniscient. Indeed that would rob a book of what
value it has. To me, it is the words and style of writing that create meaning better than any marshalling of factoids.

And like Oscar Wilde, I believe that life imitates art rather than vice versa, so should my future dystopia prove right, I shall be happy to take credit for it. Just to clear up some misunderstandings, it seems to me wilful to say I should have singled out Fast Food Nation as a source for my chapter on beef. In fact, as the bibliography shows, I had many sources. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was singled out because it was the most significant to me.

Re sources for the dry-cleaned shrimp—perhaps Australia is free of this pernicious practice, but it’s well-known among fishmongers in North America, and as I noted in my book, the use of dry-cleaning
fluid is okayed by the FDA. Exactly what other source is required?

Errors are always regrettable but I hardly think the misspelling of one word in a Carême recipe detracts
in any meaningful way from the book. Alas, the cash-strapped publishing industry can no longer afford
the kind of checking they did in the past.

I don’t usually respond to reviews, good or bad. But I chose to answer Barbara Santich because her review ran in a university newsletter that is distributed among students. Now Last Chance to Eat is popular among students in North America who have told me that they have learned for the first time about the egg crisis, raw milk cheese controversy, the aging of beef, the apple returning to Asia, and the paint-stripped scallop. Jessa Crispin, the twenty-something blogger whose website BookSlut is one of the most influential book blogs, picked Last Chance as one of her top books of 2004. That pleased me even more than Last Chance being awarded the 2005 James Beard Award for Writing on Food, the most prestigious prize of all.

Best Wishes,
Gina Mallet
gina@ginamallet.com

Gina Mallet’s Last Chance to Eat, the Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World has been published worldwide, won the 2005 James Beard Award for Writing on Food, Cuisine Canada’s Gold Medal for food
writing, is the leading excerpt in Best Food Writing in 2005, and was named one of BookSlut’s top
five books of 2004. She is now working on Elixirs of Youth, Scientists, Scallywags, Food, Genes and
Diet.

NB - The University of Adelaide allows non commercial reproduction of material from the Research Centre for the History of Food and Drink newsletter, where these pieces appeared.

I thought we’d done well last weekend when our friend Andrew (Achilles to his mum) came around bearing an extremely impressive pastitsio.

However I think we may have just had a world record breaking weekend of eating Stuff White People Like.

First there was a cup of fair trade Ethiopian coffee (#1) and shopping at the non profit (#12) ANU Food Co-op (#48) for organic tempeh and the like (#6), followed by a trip to Choku Bai Jo (even whiter than the Farmers Market, #5). Then it was lunch at my sister’s house, a very glamourous version of surf’n'turf, fat slabs of steak from the organic butcher at Belconnen Markets, a coleslaw with homemade lime and chilli mayonnaise and a salad of prawns, avocado and kipflers:

… followed by hollowed out strawberries filled with a Campari jelly and topped with mint and lemon zest - white person heaven. The recipe is from Moveable Feast, but minus the wasabi because they’d forgotten. If only I’d known I could have bought the fresh horseradish root in the veggie crisper.

But that was just the beginning.  The peak of our weekend’s White Person experience isn’t on the Stuff White People Like site, but I heard founder Christian Lander on Radio National (#44) one day saying about the best thing you could do for a white person was cook them something from your culture and tell them it wasn’t available in restaurants or anywhere else.

Our next door neighbour, Ann, is a follower of Tibetan Buddhism (#2), and is one year away from finishing a three year meditation retreat in France. While she’s away, her house is used by Bhutanese students (who are generally either studying Buddhism or doing MBAs, as far as I could work out.)  On Friday afternoon Dogpa (a phonetic spelling) invited us to come on Saturday and celebrate the coronation of their new King, explaining that we could experience some Bhutanese culture as everyone would be wearing their national dress and there would be Bhutanese food.

They had set up a beautiful white marquee in the back yard, with a flagpole and the Bhutanese flag and thangkas and photographs of their beloved monarchs.  Their national dress is very handsome indeed, and the women in particular looked very beautiful (#11).

There were a  few brief and charming speeches explaining the significant current events in Bhutan (#18), and a including a passing reference to their happiness that Barack Obama (#8) had been elected in the US in the same week that they celebrated a hundred years of their monarchy, the achievements of the Fourth King, Jigme Singye Wangchuck (which include the peaceful transition from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional one with a democratically elected Parliament) and the coronation of the Fifth King, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck.  There was butter tea and saffron rice, and advice that this was a ritual offering, and we should hang around for the feasting.

omg, the feasting. The community members had divided up the cooking, and there were about 15 or 20 different dishes. Tripe! Pig’s head! Dry beef! Ema-datsi, the national dish of chilli and cheese. People kept asking us how we coped with the chilli, but that was no problem for us. I’m not buying Ruth Reichl’s view that Bhutanese cuisine is “the worst in the world” - the food was delicious, and the tripe in particular was extraordinary; braised to a beautiful soft consistency and firey hot.

There’s not much information about Bhutanese food on the web - the country only began to use television and the internet in 1999 - but there’s a cultural overview here.

And yes, the White Folk joined in the Bhutanese dancing.

Over the years I have moved a lot, and had many herb and vegetable gardens. Building them has proven to be an essential part of my settling into any new place, even if the landscape is not ideal. I have gardened in tight spots, in pots and sour soil, dealt with overshadowing, put up with short term leases and, in the first home I owned, accommodated the tendency of my then partner to steal the best spots for spiky grevilleas.

My garden tends to reflect my mental state. If it flourishes there is every chance I am procrastinating mightily, but my soul is mending. The reverse applies. The garden in my last house fell over and decayed because I got too busy writing a PhD, but my relationship was also withering on the vine. In the year that passed between moving out and buying my new house I had no garden - just a few styrofoam pots. I didn’t even have a compost heap. Now I have a new house, Maxholme, and this is the backyard, as it appeared on my first day of ownership.

It’s a 611 square metre blank slate, so the work begins to build a garden that reflects who I am - a woman on the very brink of turning 40, with no inclination to please anyone other than myself and my hungry child. A blank slate suits me very well indeed, and I will fill it with food. In these days of financial uncertainty and mortgage stress it is quite fashionable to be worrying about food security, but that doesn’t matter one jot to me, I’d be planting food anyway.

Of course, blank slates take a lot of work to fill. This was the herb patch - dead tomatoes, crusted earth, feral Vietnamese mint, barely hanging on rosemary and sage and a death lily patch (a nursery for snails).

After a permaculture makeover, the insertion of some herbs I’d been coddling and some spring rain … the death lilies and mint are a nice feature now.

My pride and joy is my ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ compost heap, which uses corflutes retained from political campaigns in a most creative way. Look whose face is helping the lawn clippings decompose! If you take your fingers from your eyes and look behind the compost heap you can see nascent vege beds.

It’s both exciting and soothing to watch the garden take off. When I moved in, on the coldest day of the winter, all I found was sage and rosemary, but since then a range of mints have come up, and I’ve added parsley, thyme, chives, lemon balm, garlic chives, pyrethrum, curry plant, tarragon, strawberries, tomatoes, lettuces, oregano and coriander to the herb bed, along with a bay tree. I’ve put in beds of spuds and asparagus, broad beans, corn and peas and am nursing seedlings of zucchini, pumpkin, basil, kale and silver beet. The trees are the biggest investment. I’ve got a crab apple, a cumquat, a meyer lemon, and four hazelnuts, which are part of a local food sharing initiative, along with raspberries and blueberries. I’ve also added trees that will bear the fruits I love the best, and that are so hard to find in good quality in the shops - black genoa fig, white peaches and apricots. In this picture you can see the very first baby apricot.

However, if I’m to be honest, all there is to eat right now in my garden is herbs. Which brings me to the chooks, and the cooking part of the post. The chooks are a curse in many ways. They have obliged me to buy many rolls of wire to keep them from turning over my mulch and devouring my seedlings. But they are funny, cute and friendly. They talk all the time and rush all over you if you venture into the garden. Their A-frame chook tractor, which lets them scratch away at the ground, has been a great way to start neat little squares of garden. They provide precious chook poo and they also pick through the death lilies to devour legions of snails. Here they are, at work in the back yard.

And they reward us with perfect eggs, whilst exerting a powerful influence over food-averse children (one I own and one who visits often). The kids delight in things like this:

Also, it seems, my vegetable averse one will eat vegies if they are wrapped in or mixed into an omelette and the egg-averse visitor changed his tune after a few trips to the chook house.

The challenge of using all those eggs has led to new discoveries. I’ve learned the secret of the perfect poached egg, which is to boil a deep potful of water, slip in some vinegar, get it to a rolling boil, stir it to a whirlpool and crack a day old egg into the central vortex. When made with home grown eggs my Dead Cert Seduction Lemon Delicious comes out a brilliant yellow. And I also came up with this, a variation on a Spanish trick, which uses my favouritest lentil in the universe, Puy (blue) lentils.

To do this all you need is a thick gluggy beany mix, like Stephanie Alexander’s divine Puy lentil salad, or the version I did here, which has tomatoes and optional bacon in it, and pop it into a casserole dish. Level off the top and pack it down. Then use the back of a table spoon to make recesses in the surface and break an egg into the hollows. Drizzle some olive oil on top of each egg and bake at about 180 for about 30 minutes, or until the eggs look set. It’s delicious. You can also do baked eggs this way in ramekins, with a beany blob underneath. The creamy egg protein goes so nicely with the beans and who’d have thought the kids would lap up the entire package?

By the way, the chooks are never for eating, and neither is this resident of Maxholme:

Sorry about the red eye, but it’s kind of her nature.