Top local takeaways in the age of COVID-19

Since arriving home from Germany six weeks ago now (where has the time gone), I have done a LOT of cooking. Roast chicken, lamb shanks, teriyaki salmon, lasagne, stir fries, risotto, curries, soups, steak and salad, Thai noodles, tuna patties and sticky pork to name just a few. And that's before I get onto all the cake, bread and biscuit baking.

We've also tried to support local eateries. With every restaurant and cafe unable to operate normally at present, many are providing takeaway options, home dinner kits or even home delivery. In the COVID-19 era, the term 'takeaway' definitely does not only mean fast food. We've had burgers and pork and fennel sausage rolls from Frank's, hand made pasta and prepared sauces from Osteria at Petty Sessions, fish and chips from Aqua Grill and Tangaroa Kai, and Thai from Huon's Little Treasure. Last night we had a foot of pepperoni pizza from Osteria, with a salad made from produce included in our 'ration pack' delivery from Fat Pig Farm. Today's lunch was pork rillette (pictured above) from the same ration pack, spread on a hot piece of sourdough toast, plus more of the delicate salad leaves. It's surprising that I can still fit into my jeans, really. And there's much more on offer in our local area... sushi from Masaaki for starters! Oh wow, can't wait to give that a go.

A moment in time

Almost two years ago, we were among the first to experience long table dining at the newly opened Fat Pig Farm, run by Matthew Evans and Sadie Chrestman, at a local business dinner organised by the Kingborough & Huon Community Enterprise Centre (KHBEC). Last week we were back, for another KHBEC dinner. Paddock to plate has become a cliche these days, but you can see it with your own eyes at Fat Pig Farm. Sadie told us about the philosophy of Fat Pig Farm. It's about a moment in time: the produce harvested and cooked that day is different from any other day. It's also about community: the local producers, growers, winemakers and staff who share a love of real food, as well as the people who come together at the table to eat it. The meal was truly special, from the lemon and ginger hot toddy served on arrival to individual desserts served in glasses to make standing up and networking easy. The Fat Pig Farm team knows how to cater, that's for sure. David and I have wanted to visit for a Friday Feast for ages. We've held out, thinking that friends or family visiting from the mainland might be keen to join us, but to no avail. We'll just have to book it in for ourselves sometime.

Fresh walnuts

What to do when you are given a lovely big bag of walnuts and don't have a nutcracker? Hmm... I did what many of us would these days and googled the problem. Up pop plenty of videos demonstrating complicated methods of cracking walnut shells. I fetch a regular dinner knife as recommended in one of the videos, but the first walnut I pick up splits in two in my hand! All but three open easily that way, the others I prise open with the knife. After that I am left with about 250 grams of freshly shelled walnuts, which I lightly crush in the mortar and pestle. A Matthew Evans recipe for honey and walnut biscuits that I saved from an old SBS Feast magazine years ago uses 150 grams. The rest I add to a maple syrup granola mix and bake in the oven. I'm sure I'm not just imagining that they taste better than the store bought walnuts from a packet.

A neighbourly delivery

We are lucky to have neighbours who've become dear friends. We share a lot of laughs and food and good times. We have plenty of excess eggs to share and my neighbour is a whiz at preserving and bottling. Yesterday morning, this load of 'experimental jams' arrived. I can't wait to try the sloe gin strawberry and the frangelico peach!

And yet, because of where we live, these 'neighbours' are at least five minutes walk away, so we have our own space and don't get in each other's hair. Unlike when we lived in Sydney and had five neighbours on our immediate boundary... we heard every argument and smelled every meal and cigarette. I don' miss that one bit.

Greengages

Almost seven years after moving to Tasmania, I'm still trying things I never knew of in Sydney. A friend was visiting last week and we stopped at the Green Shed in Grove to pick up some cherries. She grabbed a bag of greengage plums too. I've had locally made greengage jam before (delicious) and just assumed that the fruit would be a bit sour or tart and not that great to eat uncooked. Wrong! These little gems are delicious. Yesterday, a friend emailed to say her neighbours are on holiday and their greengage tree is overloaded with fruit... would I like some? Oh yes please. Some to eat fresh and some for crumble cake. Think I'll have to plant a greengage tree.

Sourdough from scratch

Jay Patey is the king of sourdough bread in Tasmania. His Pigeon Whole Bakers in Hobart is known far and wide for it. After my very poor attempts at baking sourdough breads in the past, it was time to learn from the master. Over two days at the Agrarian Kitchen, we made a stoneground wheat sourdough and a variation with apple and walnuts, a sourdough ciabatta, focaccia, a purple wheat loaf, a heavy Danish rye, a spelt porridge loaf, lemon rye bread and even sourdough doughnuts. Some of it was baked in a proper wood-fired brick oven and some in a traditional oven so we could recreate it at home. At the end of day one, I plonked some ham on roughly hewn chunks of the still-warm wheat sourdough and that was dinner. Perfect.

It would take years of practice and tweaking to get close to Jay's breads, but the most important thing is, I've regained some confidence and picked up enough tips, tricks and inspiration to give it a go again. Our teachers Jay and Sharon were patient and good humoured, happy to explain and demonstrate over again and polite enough not to laugh at our novice bread shaping techniques. And I arrived home this evening with seven different loaves to eat and a spare doughnut for David. I just love eating good bread (definitely not in the anti-carb or gluten intolerable camps) but that's the thing - it has to be good, tasty, nutritious bread. Not fluffy white stuff passed off as bread. I wanted to know how to cultivate wild yeasts in a starter so that if I go away for a few weeks, neglect it, and return to a nasty-smelling dead mixture in the fridge, I can start from scratch, all over again.

The 'Secrets of Sourdough' course is held in winter at The Agrarian Kitchen in Lachlan in the Derwent Valley near Hobart. Join their mailing list to find out the dates for next year.

Ways with broad beans

It's that time of year again. Piles of snow peas and broad beans ready to pick every day. Our freezer now contains zip lock bags full of blanched broad beans to eat throughout the year. Add some of the lovely chorizo from Mount Gnomon Farm bought from the farmer at the Farm Gate Market just before Christmas, and you have one very tasty risotto. Actually it was the first risotto I ever made. I'm not normally a fan of what The Katering Show's McCartney and McLennan call 'hot wet rice'.  Check out the hilarious 'Thermomix' episode for an explanation. My other favourite broad bean recipe was recommended by a friend, Pauline. It's for broad beans with parsley, feta and almonds and it is a very quick and delicious way to eat them. Do you have a favourite broad bean recipe to share?

Making the most of meat

Hidden in my collection of cookbooks is one called 'Making the most of meat'. Most of the recipes feature heavy use of lard. Another gem in my collection is a Woman's Day publication called 'The Meat Lover's Cookbook'. Many of the recipes involve using fruit in meat dishes, a pet hate of mine. Especially apricot chicken, urgh. However, the book also contains useful diagrams of animals showing where the different cuts of pork, beef and lamb come from, along with suggestions for how to cook them and how to carve them. I used it last week when slicing up some magnificent pieces of beef for the freezer.

Cradoc Hill Abattoir is open for retail sales on Friday afternoons from 2-5pm. There you can buy good quality, locally grown and butchered meat, in bulk, at good prices. I had been meaning to go for ages, and finally made the trip during a week off work earlier this month. We can see the large white abattoir building from our house, so it's quite close as the crow flies, but about a 25 minute drive to reach the other side of the river. On our recent visit, we bought a huge rump, some scotch and about 6 kilos of fresh silverside (not corned, as most Australians know it) which I wanted to marinate and turn into a lovely German roast called Sauerbraten. It all needed another couple of weeks aging in the fridge before I divided it up for the freezer and cooking.

Then we had the offer of a 'quarter of beef' from friends in our village. The offal from the beast is already in the freezer and the dogs have been happily eating hearts and tongues and things for their dinner. Then this week, we took delivery of many kilos of beautiful aged beef. There are several things I love about this. The animal was on pasture just down the road from us, we drove past them most days. They had a good life. No chemicals or added hormones in sight. It's well-aged and lovely quality meat. But most of all, having a variety of cuts that I might not normally cook with means we try yummy new things. Generally, we eat less meat these days, but when we do, why not make it special. And local.

The perfect food for a Tasmanian winter

Given my love of German food, I was excited to find a store in Hobart called Wursthaus Kitchen not long after we moved to Tasmania. Then disappointed to find that other than bratwurst, they didn't actually stock any German foods. They have a lovely range of Italian and French foods and a good selection of local Tasmanian fare too. But the name was definitely misleading.

Then last week I spotted an article in the paper about German chef Rainer Oberdieck who moved to Hobart with his Tasmanian wife, and a classic German cooking class he was holding at the Wursthaus. The story mentioned Rheinischer Sauerbraten and I was sold. I rang the store first thing Monday and booked in.

We made a traditional apple strudel with vanilla custard, pork knuckles (Schweinshaxe), goulash, the sweet-and-sour roast silverside called Sauerbraten and Bavarian bread dumplings (Semmelknodel) which are a great way to use up old bread rolls and perfect for mopping up sauce or gravy. We then sampled a little of each, accompanied by red cabbage and a selection of German beers from Weihenstephaner. For some of these dishes, it was a case of "here's one I prepared earlier" because they take hours, or in the case of Sauerbraten, days to make. I came home with a booklet of recipes and new confidence to make more of the food I love.

I can't help but think that people who find German food bland have only sampled Schnitzel with mashed potato from a chain restaurant. Although Rainer said he has had to adjust his cooking in Tasmania for local tastes and the availability of ingredients, all of these dishes are well spiced, tender and extremely tasty. To test out what I'd learned, last night we had a few friends over for a giant pot of goulash and some bread dumplings. I am happy to report that everyone found it as tasty as I did . Now I just need to source the cut of beef I need to make that Sauerbraten. Lecker.

Dog squad on duty at Taste of the Huon

This year, members of the Huon Valley Dog Walking Association volunteered at the Taste of the Huon for the first time. Dogs are not permitted at the festival, for 'hygiene reasons' it says on the signs at the ticket booths. In previous years there were a few dogs left in hot cars who needed to be broken out by police, perhaps by people who didn't know about the 'no dogs' policy until they got there. So this year we offered to patrol the car parking areas for any dogs in distress. I'm happy to report that there were no such issues this year, although this lovely girl was chained to a fence all day Sunday and we kept returning to disentangle her leg from her chain and make sure she had water.

On Monday afternoon, our group was on the 'clean team', making sure the tables were clean, rubbish was in the bins and the bins were emptied promptly. It was a fun day actually and good exercise! The organisers did a great job and the festival was very busy, with lovely weather, great food and drink and entertainment drawing a record-breaking crowd of 14,000 people on Sunday and almost as many on Monday. On Sunday, David and I got there in time to have lunch. My oysters from Bruny Island, beef pie from Geeveston, Inn Cider from Margate and salted caramel ice cream sandwich were delicious.

Rhubarb. Jam.

It's my favourite kind, and thanks to a bumper crop, I made quite a few jars of the stuff this year. David brought home an enormous bag of plums from a customer, so I tried making jam with those too. It was less than successful... so I plan to use it in a jam tart recipe from Matthew Evan's Winter on the Farm book. Speaking of winter... Autumn hit with a vengeance last week, with temperatures at our place plunging to just 4 degrees and snow on Mount Wellington. We lit the fire and put our ugg boots back on. If that was summer, I think it might be over.

Show Day

This year I did not work on the Hobart Show Day public holiday. It's always a tough one, as the rest of Australia is still working and it's a busy time of year at work. But we took the day off and David and I went to the show. As I have mentioned before, I love a good agricultural show - seeing the cattle, sheep, goats, poultry, the farmyard nursery with the cute yellow ducklings, the horses and even the rabbits and cavies. We patted one of the rabbits and I think it was the softest thing I've ever touched. You can keep the dagwood dogs, the fairy floss and the showbags, but it was still an entertaining day out - although an expensive one for families. It must be said that the Woolworths fruit and vegetables display is not a patch on the one at the Sydney Royal Show and I was disappointed that the old chairlift is no longer there as that part of the showgrounds is now a big construction site. But it was a good thing to do once anyway. Some churros, hot chips and an ice cream later and it was time to go home.

I scream

I finally succumbed and ordered an ice cream maker online last week. Some of them require you to freeze and re-freeze the metal bowl during the process, but we don't actually have a freezer in the house. We have a deep chest freezer up in the garage, and it wouldn't be very practical to be running up and down the stairs with half-frozen confectionery. So I bought a fancy machine with a compressor that does its own freezing during the process.

The first batch I tried was strawberry, made with a punnet of fresh local Huon Valley strawberries, milk, cream, sugar, salt, vanilla... that's it. We took it to our friends' place on the weekend to eat after dinner and it was delicious. The next batch was vanilla bean, made with much the same ingredients plus five egg yolks. The mixture needed to be refrigerated overnight as it had been heated during preparation. Also delicious! Now I need to get onto the flavours I am most excited about making: honey, green tea, pistachio, coffee, lemon sorbet... mmm.

Rhubarb rhubarb

Rhubarb from the garden

Rhubarb crumble tart

Yum!

An indoor day

It was icy and wet outside. Snowflakes floated down but the ground was mostly just soggy. The temperature didn't reach 2 degrees. The hothouse was more like an icebox. The chooks were locked up in their warm, dry shed. We lit a fire early and kept it fired up all day. It was a perfect day for baking: hazelnut and chocolate biscuits for afternoon tea and fish pie for dinner.