Tasmanian edibles

There is so much food in this landscape, if you know where to look....

Last week I was invited to talk to the inspiring and knowledgeable group of gardeners who make up the South Channel Garden Club.  I’d previously run a workshop with them on the propagation of Tasmanian native plants, which had been organised through the Understorey Network. This time around I was to talk about growing and cooking with bushfoods. I decided to focus on the plants that I grow and use regularly, and those that are plentiful in the wild. There are a huge range of wild edible plants out there, both native and introduced, and it's up to us to experiment with them and help shape a truly local food vernacular. There is a lot of intellectual knowledge about wild foods, and many wonderful restaurants are using them on their plates, but it seems that few of us are making use of these plants in our home kitchens.

Sea celery, Apium prostratum

Perhaps the most familiar tasting and approachable of the wild foods from our end of the country is Sea Celery, or Apium prostratum. It grows right on the edge of the sea, usually in damp soil. I went to collect a sample recently in an area where it was plentiful the season before only to discover the shoreline where it grew was entirely eroded away. It has a refreshing, earthy, parsley-like flavour, and if you harvest a little from the wild you’ll get a beautiful coating of sea salt on the leaves. You can use it anywhere you’d use parsley, my favourite use is to top a freshly caught flathead or a pot of pippies cooked on the beach. We sell plants of this on our market stall, and it grows quite easily in fertile soils, protected from severe frosts and in full sun. Up here at Neika, 300m above sea level, it is a sluggish grower in winter, but takes off in spring.

Island Sea Celery, or Apium insulare is a closely related plant found in the wild in the Furneaux Islands and on Lord Howe, somewhere I heard a theory that it was moved from one place to the other by sealers. It is aromatically reminiscent of Chinese celery, but with a surprising hit of mandarin to the nose. It’s a beautiful addition to a clear broth, fragrant and cleansing. I have collected seed of this one and hope to have it available for your garden in spring.

Kunzea ambigua

Kunzea ambigua is a Tasmanian plant close to my heart. Much of my childhood was spent on the East Coast of Tasmania, and as you journey North along the coast the landscape changes from dolerite to the granite lands of many endless summers. The Kunzea thrives on these well drained granite derived soils, where it can dominate the understorey. It blooms with incredibly sweetly scented, white flowers in spring. We use the leaves fresh, when they have a thymey/floral/citrus/menthol aroma, or dried, when the menthol dissipates. It lends itself to sweet or savoury applications, the gardening chef loves to season a joint of lamb with generous handfuls of it. I’ve used it to flavour cheese crackers, and it makes a refreshing and delicious cup of tea. I wouldn’t recommend it as a garden plant, unless you are well away from bushland or in its natural habitat, as it produces thousands of seeds and can quickly colonise and spread into bushland and displace native vegetation. We have decided not to sell plants of this one, due to its nature of environmental vandalism, but we do have bunches of fresh herb available on our stall most Sundays.

Baeckea gunniana is a native alpine plant. I have a beautiful memory of being on a bushwalk and sitting, exhausted, on a fallen log. I plucked a stem from a flowering Baeckea plant that was growing out of a pretty hummock of sphagnum moss, and popped it into my mug with hot water to make tea. The sweet, spicy, floral, menthol aroma wafting from my cup into the cool forest air was a truly beautiful thing. I have a few of these extremely slow growing plants in my garden and we often include it in gingerbreads. Since this plant grows at a snail's pace, so we don't have any available at his stage, but watch this space!

Baeckea gunniana

Baeckea gunniana

Seablite, Suaeda australis, is a common coastal succulent. Its young, fleshy tips give a refreshing, salty burst of flavour when used raw. It is a prolific grower and is easily propagated by cuttings.

I spoke of others on the night, Pigface, Carpobrotus rossii, Round Leaf Pigface, Disphyma crassifolium, Native Thyme, Ozothamnus obcordatus and Native Pepper, Tasmania lanceolata and the list of edible Tasmanian plants is far longer than you may imagine.

Black lip abalone and samphire. One of my favourite wild foods.

I am a nervous speaker and so I sought to butter up my audience by feeding them, also it's a really great way to elevate the idea of eating wild foods to a practical, rather than just an intellectual, exercise, so I took along some cheese crackers flavoured with Kunzea, and some shortbread flavoured with the Baeckea. I am absolutely terrible at sticking to (and writing!) recipes so here is an approximation of what I may have made….

Baeckea and molasses shortbread

I warned you that I can’t follow recipes, so please find a ‘proper’ recipe below, but I’ll often add slivers of candied ginger or cumquat to mine as the mood takes me. Also our girl's school has an allergy policy that doesn't allow nuts in their lunchboxes, so I substitute the almond meal with half ground sunflower/pumpkin/flax seeds and half ground buckwheat and/or oats to make their snacks as nutrient dense as possible. We try to minimise our intake of refined sugars so I substitute 100g of rapadura for the 80g of conventional sugar. This won’t ‘cream’ as well as castor sugar but I love the way it melts as you bake the biscuits, forming tiny, caramel chunks. Baeckea may be almost impossible to find but you can substitute any gingerbread spice or some dried Kunzea, which we often have in bunches on our Farm Gate stall.

100g almond meal

80g sugar (I use rapadura but you could use 50% brown sugar and 50% caster sugar)

100g white flour

100g spelt flour

2tsp ground ginger

1tsp freshly ground cinnamon

½ tsp Baeckea gunniana leaves, stripped from their stems.

25g molasses

130g cold, cubed butter

Sift together the flours, almond meal and spices and set aside.

Combine the sugar, molasses, Baeckea and butter in a food processor and blend until pale and creamy. Add the flours and pulse until it comes together. You can shape and bake these immediately but I like to make a double batch, form it into logs about 4cm in diameter and wrap in waxed paper and refrigerate. We’ll take on out of the fridge about 10 minutes before we want to bake it, then slice into 5mm(ish) slices and bake at 170ºc for about 15 minutes. And this leaves you with a few in the fridge to bring out and bake fresh when the need arises, as it often does around here…

Kunzea and cheese crackers 

Adapted from Belinda Jeffery’s ‘Cheese and Nigella Seed Biscuits’

Kunzea ambigua, when fresh, has a minty, mentholy note which I think is a beautiful foil for the richness of the cheese in these crackers. I’ve also made these with sea celery or Mediterranean/European herbs like lovage or lemon savoury.

2 ½cups plain flour

1tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

black pepper

2tsp Kunzea leaves stripped from their stems, add a little more if using the dried herb.

40g grated parmesan, we use Elgaar’s version, a delicious, local organic cheese from a farm that treats its cows beautifully.

200g cheddar, we’d use Elgaar’s ‘Meadow’

250g cold, unsalted butter, cubed

1½tbs lemon juice

Sift together the four, salt, pepper and baking powder, add to food processor with the Kunzea and cheeses and process until combined. Add the butter and process until it looks like bread crumbs, then add the lemon juice and process until it comes roughly together. We chill the dough and roll it out so the girls can cut out whimsical shapes for their lunchboxes, or form it into logs and slice and bake as needed. Bake in a moderate oven for about 15 minutes.

I recently held a foraging workshop for Channel Living where we spoke about edible weeds and native plants as well as the perils and ethics of harvesting them. There is another workshop in the offing that I am running, together with botanists and sustainability experts, I'll let you know more when it's official. I would love to do more of this work, especially over the winter when the garden is a little quieter. If you're interested please get in touch with us via provtas@gmail.com to discuss rates and logistics. We can identify native trees, shrubs and flowering plants and weed species and teach you about their edibility and other uses, and also offer advice on propagation and cultivation.

Or you can find us at Farm Gate Market every Sunday from 9-1 with a huge range of potted edible plants, both native and exotic, and produce from our garden.

Common sense is not so common

'Golden Crookneck' summer squash.

The proverbial has hit the fan. The horse#%@* that is.

Our industrialised, regulated food system is SO screwed up.

It is illegal for me to use second hand egg cartons and, despite a whole evening of googling, I could only find one reference to the possible danger of used egg cartons (on a website for paranoid parents, warning them of the dangers of using said cartons for their children’s craft activities). But while being subjected to regulations like these, we are legally sold food that has been bleached, irradiated, extruded and sprayed to keep us ‘safe’, and somebody finds Black Beauty in the frozen lasagne.

Call me strange, but I wouldn’t recoil at the thought of eating Black Beauty, providing she had been humanely raised and fed a healthy diet, any more than I recoil at the idea of eating an egg from a second hand carton. The problem for me is the homogenisation of food products from around the world to such a point that we can't recognise what we are buying. Surely horse doesn't taste like beef? But since things are minced, doused with chemical seasonings and standardised to all taste the same to our industrially dumbed down palates, nobody notices. 

The industrial system is not capable of protecting us from listeria, salmonella, E.coli and antibiotic resistant bacteria. What it is capable of is spreading these things far and wide. Just have a think back to the tragic E. coli outbreak in Germany in 2011. This wasn’t caused by an unpasteurised cheese, a second hand egg carton or nitrate free ham. In fact, as far as I can tell, due to the massive movement of food across the globe, the source still seems unclear with Spain, Germany and Egypt all thought to be sources of contamination at some point during the investigation. I found an article on an outbreak of Salmonella in the UK that was blamed on ready to eat, pre sliced watermelon shipped there from Brazil. Isn’t that the perfect caricature of our energy expensive, wasteful, ridiculous food system? Is it so hard to ship something in its own skin and use a knife yourself?

One of the reasons I am so determined to make our garden work is that I believe it is the antithesis of this. Land that would otherwise be used for recreational horses or lawn mowing, instead producing heaps of really good food. Little, labour intensive food production systems feeding as many local people as possible with minimum carbon and waste outputs, and maximum flavour, nutrition, diversity and joy.

Only a small scale market garden can feed their pigs and chickens on apples, blackberries, thistles and spent vegetables produced on site. Manure goes back into the garden and the animals perform tillage and pest control services. On a plot our size, many more than the twenty chickens and two to three pigs we keep could begin to compact the soil. The manure we produce, without our garden to use it in, would become a waste disposal problem, the weeds and bolted vegetables we end up with would be harder to compost and process without the animals. Our garden is becoming a balanced ecosystem that, as we build soil and our skills and experience grow, I hope to make as efficient and beautiful as possible. Spare plants from the nursery go to our kid's school garden, neighbours come by with their scraps for the animals and our kids are learning about flavour, nature and hard work.

Rillettes hard at work.

Our small garden also guarantees that when I pass your change across my market table you will see the soil that grew your vegetables stuck under my nails. You can challenge me about the brand of seeds I use, or about my excessive use of sticky tape. You can ask me how I treat my soil, or what the strange leaf is in your salad.

But, next year I probably won’t be able to sell you eggs. A new egg act that comes into place late this year I think will make it unviable for me. Our chickens are a truly important part of our garden ecosystem, selling the eggs helps to balance the cost of supplementary feed. From what I understand I’ll need to individually date stamp each egg, submit and pay for inspections as well as paying a registration fee of more than $300 a year. As small producers our time is, and should be, taken up digging, watering, growing and marketing our goods. There is no way I have time to read and understand the act, certainly no time for me to attempt to fight it, and, more than likely, no chance of success if I did find the time. Sure, my friends say I can go underground and sell the eggs privately, but why shouldn’t my loyal and beautiful market customers who have built up trust with me and my methods be able to choose to buy my food and instead, be forced to buy from a producer who has the economy of scale to manage the costs of the new system? This is just my example of red tape hampering productivity and the sharing of real food, there are many more small producers out there with similar fights on their hands. We are taking responsibility for our family and our land, hoping to create employment for ourselves, food for others and be part of Tasmania's spectacular food culture.

Tasmanian Tree Frog and French sorrel.

This, in a world where our food systems are such that waste is an integral part of them. Where packaging is more important than contents, and labelling that gives us the option to make informed choices is not law. Where bleach, irradiation and vacuum packaging take the place of freshness and hygiene, and the rights of multinational companies to trade across borders transcends our right to know what we are eating.

We need a food regulation system that can cater for all producers, not just the large ones, and enable small farms who priorotise soil health, animal welfare, carbon sequestration and flavour to thrive. The current one that seems to favour big, energy and waste intensive, industrial food. Small farms like ours are key to true food security. Small scale farms rely on personal interactions, trust and common sense to keep food safe, not reams of paper, registration fees and legislation. Value adding on small farms needs to be easier, to sell a few jars of jam or honey in the quiet months of the year would require us to build or hire a commercial kitchen, outweighing any much needed financial advantage we may gain.

It is an unnatural, nonsensical environment we have created, where a gardener can’t make jam in their own kitchen to sell at market, but beef/horse can turn up in your microwave from goodness knows where.  

We need legislators to fight our corner for us, as we are too busy digging, and we need to take ownership of the fact that what we buy shapes the world we live in.

I am writing from my heart, no references or sensible things like that here, but here are a few things, in the order in which I discovered them, that resounded with me and shaped my thinking on food.

Living the Good Life, Linda Cockburn

Real Food, Nina Plank

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Barbara Kingsolver

Food Inc.

Eating Animals, Johnathon Safran Foer

Also pretty much everything on the blog roll on the right of your screen, there are many inspiring and incredible people fighting the good fight!

Nick's wonderful discussion of how he sources his milk.

And finally, this lovely rant shared on Facebook this week by Elaine and Colette.

You may also have noticed we're at Farm Gate Market in Hobart with our produce and ever growing range of edible plants every single Sunday! The chef has left the kitchen and has become a full time food gardener, so expect to see our stall brimming with wonderful food over the coming months.

Underground bulbs of walking onions and winter savoury.
Both hardy and easy to grow, both utterly delicious.

Chilli plants

I've just finished packing the chilli and capsicum plants for market tomorrow. Some varieties are old friends that we have grown and enjoyed over previous summers, others are new to us, but all sound delicious. We grow most of ours in an unheated polytunnel with mesh walls, but they are all easily grown outdoors in a warm sunny garden or in pots. Potted plants can also be moved indoors at the onset of cold weather for an extended harvest. 

Alma Paprika, unripe fruit and flower.

Plant them into good, rich soil and remove the first few flowers to encourage the plant to put some energy into growing before it begins fruiting. All varieties can be harvested green or red, and, if protected from frost, your plants will continue fruiting well into winter. Our pantry is well stocked with little jars of dried chillies and bottles of chilli plum sauce, and the odd jar of pickled peppers is still lurking in the fridge. The most precious one for me is our paprika. When dried it forms luminous, dark red flakes and smells sweet, rich and complex.

Friggitello Italian frying pepper, harvest while green and grill, then finish with salt and a little vinegar, or allow to ripen to red and use in salads. Mild.

Padron Spanish frying pepper. Mild with the occasional hot fruit giving them the nickname of 'Russian Roulette Pepper'. Grill over coals or fry in oil and finish with salt. Most rate at 500 on the Scoville scale with the occasional fruit getting up to 25,000.

Ciliegia or Devil’s Kiss Italian medium/hot pepper with small, round red cherry-type fruit. Good for stuffing, fresh eating or pickling.

Hot Paper Lantern Cool climate alternative to Habanero for hardcore cooks. Red, wrinkled HOT fruit. Grows well in pots. Scoville rating of 400,000 - 450,000

Calbrese Another hot, Italian cherry type. Use fresh, fried, pickled or dried.

Alma Paprika A favourite of mine, use fresh or dried. Red, round, warm but not super hot fruit with a rich flavour. 100-1000 on Scoville scale.

Drying our first harvest of Alma Paprika.

Pepperoncini Another good performer at Neika. Thin walled pepper with great flavour and a little warmth, bred for pickling, also great dried. 

Pepperoncini

Beaver Dam Hungarian heirloom, warm to hot flavour, great for pickles and salsas. Suited to cool climates. 500-1000

Antohi Romanian Romanian heirloom, introduced to North America by Jan Antohi, an acrobat, when he defected. Mild, sweet flavour suited to eating fresh or fried. Can be picked at the yellow stage or left to ripen to red. Gets a zero on the Scoville scale.

Rocoto Perennial tree chilli. If protected from frost this pepper will fruit all winter. It produces great crops of hot, round peppers. May grow to 4m but easily pruned to a manageable size. Withstands cool temperatures, but not frosts. 50,000 to 200,000

Rocoto

Cayenne Good producer of long, red, hot peppers. Use fresh or dry for year round use. 30,000-50,000 Scoville points.

Find us at Farm Gate Market every Sunday from now until Christmas with these, loads of other wonderful plants and produce, along with gift vouchers and edible plants in vintage terracotta pots.

Picking flowers

Today is pick day. It's still early in the season, and tiny green shoots, radishes and flowers are at their peak. The last of the winter roots and stored squash are finished and summer vegetables are still in their seedling pots, hardening off in the spring sun.

But there's still a bounty to be found. We crawl, on hands and knees, through the garden seeking out tender leaves of chickweed, delicate, sweet and peppery radish flowers complete with buds and succulent stems, baby red orach leaves, tips of Lebanese cress, anisey, green seeds of sweet cicely and little leaves of lemon liquorice mint with their strange scent of jelly babies.

Where we live and garden, on the lower slopes of Mount Wellington, we are surrounded by wilderness and the soundtrack to our work is provided by swarms of bees who don't seem bothered by us stealing their flowers. Currawongs sit in the dead stringybarks at the top of the hill and sing their nine-note, off-key song, plovers occasionally rise from their nests in the paddock to fly shrieking at any hawk or falcon that dares enter their airspace. Closer to hand, wrens pause from hunting aphids on the quince tree and sing with a fervour that belies their size, and robins sit on the handle of my fork watching us closely on the off chance we might unearth a worm, letting out the occasional trill to remind us to look up from our work and admire their crimson bellies.

Native hen eggs, this nest is right next to our pumpkin patch.

The tidbits we gather are off to our favourite restaurants, some for Garagistes, The Stackings at Peppermint Bay and for The Source and events at Mona. On Saturday afternoon I'll pick these same leaves and flowers for Farm Gate Market as salads for you to take home. And while this is all happening, I'm feeling grateful to have started a garden like ours, in Southern Tasmania now.

Last fortnight's version of our Farm Gate salad.

The food culture that is blossoming here is in tune with how we want to work. Chefs who demand unusual produce contribute to biodiversity. A few years ago it was rocket or mesculin mix in a salad when you went out for dinner. Now, through the seasons, we would offer local chefs more than 70 different greens.  This allows us to use what grows with no need for lights, green houses, chemicals or other interventions needed to grow things out of season and gives us the chance to experiment with new or forgotten plants.

Today I've picked radish flowers for a chef to match with rillettes for a special picnic. The peppery, juicy stems and buds will be the perfect foil for the rich meat. Chervil and sweet cicely flowers have gone out to meet a chocolate dessert. Stock flowers that have the scent of your Nanna's perfume (in a good way) will meet some similarly sweet crab. The chefs we grow for only put flowers on a plate when they will add something to a dish, be it texture, fragrance or flavour. The good looks are just a bonus so please don't push them to the side of your plate, savour them!

So thank you to the people of Hobart, chefs, their patrons and our market friends alike, for embracing the unusual, eating flowers and weeds with us, and allowing us the chance to work with the flow of the seasons in this beautiful place where we live.

This Sunday, the 4th of November, we're doing an extra Farm Gate Market and we'll have some of these greens and flowers for you to take home. We'll also have more varieties of tomato, possibly over 20 for you to choose from this week, and the first of our chilli and pepper seedlings.

The following weekend, on the 10th and 11th of November, we'll be at the Plant Hunter's Fair in an incredible garden at Neika, see the flyer below, and at Farm Gate as usual on the 11th.

Peppers for Farm Gate this week. Find a warm spot, dig in some compost and chill the beers...