The Dirty Chef

by Matthew Evans

  In winter, which in our part of the world extends a bit later into September than it does on the mainland, frost fills the valley. Thick, white frost, which fits the cliché: a blanket. It swaddles the grass around the creek bed and sits fat and thick on the lawn. The cold would freeze the cow trough, the chicken water, the gravity-fed tap in the pig paddock.

  I notice that the pigs have a little sleep-in when it’s cold. Or unreasonably rainy. They have the right idea, snuggled together in their home. It is a warm place, where two well insulated black sows can curl up in the hay, far from the ravages of winter.

  Inside my house it is usually all toasty warm. Someone clever designed this house, putting the chimney, a heat bank, right in the middle of the cottage. Apparently a farrier, a man who looks after horses’ hooves, built it. From the height of the barn, and the windows, and the chook shed, he wasn’t as tall as me.

  In my first winter, I was still getting to know the area, the seasons, the people who inhabit the valley. Some of my neighbours commute to work in Hobart, some are trying to be self-sufficient. Most have land in this gorgeous, fertile part of the world because they want to grow things, to tend things. Each little corner of this island holds many surprises, if you can get past the front gate. A lot of people lead quiet, rural lives and have no need to let strangers in until they’ve proved their worth. But one by one I got to know the people who share our space.

  One of our neighbours cares for donkeys and grows thick purple bulbs of garlic, another grows what look like Friesian crosses for beef on splendid green paddocks, others have incredible gardens or productive hazelnut trees. A bloke further up the hill has sheep of all shapes and sizes. There are plenty of cute, black-faced Suffolks along the road, and handsome alpacas who look quizzically at all who pass. They say that alpaca wool is incredibly fine. When they fight (or is it mate?) they sound like banshees in the night. There’s a market gardener with immaculate rows of bush peas. Everyone has chooks— some mongrel mixtures, others magnificent black Australorps and gaudy Plymouth Rocks. Some nurture ornamental gardens, others have sheep-chomped paddocks to the front door.

  My friends, the Bignells, had something interesting to say about lambing. How Jill Bignell was fairly freaked out by the birth of her first-born child, but her husband John, an old-time pastoralist from a big farm in the Tasmanian Highlands who’d witnessed hundreds of births, was completely okay with it.

  Birth among placental mammals, be it human or animal, is very similar. Most of the time things go well. It’s not a medical condition, it’s a natural situation. But sometimes things go horribly wrong. Both the calves we bred at Puggle Farm had difficulties at birth. A lamb died in my arms only a few weeks ago after struggling to suckle. Even being at the birth of my own son, in a hospital designed for the purpose, was remarkably stressful, not least for his mother. Birth is always a bit, well, edgy.

  So despite having witnessed several successful births during a couple of seasons of lambs, when I saw one of our ewes go into labour in the middle of the day, I wasn’t completely at ease. I checked her. Often. And all the initial signs were normal. The bag of waters, a foot, the nose and a little bit of the head. But where have the contractions gone? And it can’t be normal to still have the same amount of the lamb showing an hour later, can it?

  When I first watched the ewe go into labour, the lamb’s head was coming out, nestled just above what appeared to be its front legs. A nose poked out above the feet. A lamb is born like a diver going into the water, with the front legs cradling its head. An hour later, a pink tongue was dangling out of the lamb’s mouth, though still only the mouth and nose were showing. I don’t consider a tongue hanging out of an animal to be a good sign, though when I touched it, it was sucked back in. I was steeling myself to call someone who knows about sheep. Like my neighbour. Ten minutes later, that same tongue had gone purple. I screamed for Sadie to help and by the time she ran up the paddock, the tongue had gone black.

  I don’t know how to pull a lamb. But I do know how they’re supposed to present themselves for birth, and when I felt around the back end of the ewe, I’d been mistaken; only one of the forelegs was in the right spot. I gently pushed the lamb’s head back in, felt around for the other leg, and pulled firmly, but calmly, out and down (I’d been primed for the downward pull by an old dairy farmer when our calf was born). Out came the second leg. I tugged on both legs and the face appeared, then the whole head. Then the body fairly slipped out with no fuss. Sadie was holding the ewe, though by now the woolly mum was almost down on the ground. Relief washed over me. The lamb was out. The mother was fine.

  But a few seconds later I realised the lamb wasn’t moving. Wasn’t breathing. A bit of a nudge, a rub to remove some gloop from its face, another waggle to get it to do something, anything, to show life. Suddenly it started coughing, almost. Gasping for air. And within seconds what could’ve been a ball of wet wool was breathing evenly and waggling its head. I left it for several minutes but the mother seemed distracted or confused by the experience. So I rubbed the newborn lamb all over its mother’s head and let her clean it off. Half an hour later the lamb had suckled.

  I felt taller that day. More the farmer. More like I had contributed something worthwhile to the day. Would the lamb have been born alive if I hadn’t intervened? Probably not. Would the ewe have lived if I hadn’t kept an eye on her for a couple of days? Who can say. When you grow and rear things, you take on responsibilities, often without realising the enormity or scope of them.

  Vegetarians may not understand how I can care for an animal that is destined for the pot. How it makes me sick to think of an animal dying in the field and suffering, even if I’m raising it and saving it to eat. But I do see my role as caretaker. I have killed hundreds of slugs in the past couple of weeks. Crushed a few snails, accidentally sliced quite a few worms in half. Killing things to protect our crops is what we do. But when I can give or maintain life, be it encouraging helpful microbes in the soil, saving the golden finch nest in the part of the apple tree that was destined to be pruned, or being a part of the successful birth of a lamb, I try to do that too. It’s about awareness. Being alive and attuned to life, death and the choices we make is what we do with our lives.

  Lamb and dried broad bean cassoulet

  Serves 8

  This is a casserole, really, using lamb, though the original cassoulet probably used fresh broad beans, not the import from the Americas, the dried (fava) bean. You need to start this a day ahead, to cure the lamb bellies and soften the beans. The result is a sensational wintry stew of a kind rarely eaten.

  2 lamb bellies

  about 50 g (1¾ oz) salt, plus 1 teaspoon extra

  500 g (1 lb 2 oz) dried broad (fava) beans

  2 tablespoons olive oil

  roughly 2 tablespoons butter

  1 kg (2 lb 4 oz) diced lamb shoulder

  2 onions, diced

  2 carrots, diced

  2 celery stalks, diced

  1 fresh bay leaf

  8–10 garlic cloves, crushed

  1 tablespoon oregano, fresh if possible, or use dried Greek-style on the stem

  crusty bread and butter, to serve

  Cure the lamb bellies by sprinkling evenly with the salt and leaving in a non-reactive dish, covered, overnight in the fridge. Soak the dried broad beans in plenty of fresh water overnight too.

  The next day, preheat the oven to about 150°C (300°F/ Gas 2). Rinse the salt from the lamb and place in a baking dish, cover with foil and bake for 2 hours, or until very tender. When cool enough to handle, pull the meat from the bones and discard the fat and any sinew or bone.

  In a large flameproof casserole dish, heat half the oil and butter over a medium heat and fry the lamb shoulder until it’s browned all over. I do this in at least two batches. Remove with a slotted spoon and keep to one side. In the same pan, add the remaining butter (if not already used on the lamb) and fry the onion, carrot, celery and bay leaf well until starting to colour
. This may be a bit tricky depending on how much meat goop is stuck to the pan. Add the garlic and fry for another 2 minutes. Pop the lamb shoulder back in the pan with enough water so it’s just covered, use a wooden spoon to make sure there’s nothing stuck to the bottom of the pan, and bring to the boil. Turn down the heat, add the oregano and extra salt, and simmer, covered, for 1 hour.

  While it cooks, drain and peel the broad beans (if the skins are still a bit stuck, blanch in boiling water for a few minutes first).

  After an hour’s cooking, stir the broad beans and roughly torn lamb belly into the lamb shoulder mix, and cook for another hour or so, ideally in the oven at 150°C (300°F/Gas 2) at this stage, until the broad beans are cooked, the shoulder is tender and the liquid low but not so the cassoulet is dry.

  Serve with crusty bread and butter.

  Honey

  Most kids, you’ll find, don’t think of a modern beehive as a place where bees actually live. No, the hive full of honey and bees that most children have in their heads is the sort you see in a book such as Winnie the Pooh. A fluted, oval-shaped gourd hanging from a tree. Possibly with a small, fat bear camped at the foot, waiting for a chance to fill his honey pot.

  A modern beehive just looks like a box.

  Now, most of the time that separation between reality and imagination is probably not that big a deal. Unless you own a modern beehive and the child who thinks that hives grow on trees doesn’t recognise it and thinks it’s a good place to sit.

  Sadie’s sister Genie, her husband Alex and their two daughters Rebecca and Ammia were visiting us for a few days after Hedley was born. It was winter: Alex and I were chainsawing some timber from fallen trees after a storm while Sadie tried to get the girls excited about pulling out bracken ferns from the paddock. But for some reason, I don’t really know why, Ammia thought pulling out bracken, piece by piece, was a bit dull and she toddled off to explore the old orchard and found somewhere to sit. As children do, she banged her feet against the cute, child-sized wooden seat, and something deep inside stirred.

  I can still recall the screams. Not that I want to. If you ever hear the sound of a child with about a hundred bees on her head, it’s not something you want to remember. It gives me chills, still, and I’m not even the parent.

  To make matters worse, just the week before, Genie had found out she was rather allergic to bees. Not ‘get out the Epi-pen’, anaphylactic allergic, but allergic enough to throw a serious auto-immune reaction to a single bee bite. Not having been stung much as a kid, apparently, it had come as something of a surprise to Genie. So when Ammia’s bloodcurdling screams could be heard from the orchard, just as Alex and I were starting to unload a ute full of wood in the driveway, we hoped we weren’t headed to a swarm of bees.

  I was a few steps behind Alex. Genie got to Ammia first. The young girl’s head was swathed in bees and Genie was swatting away the insects with no fear for herself. A cloud of bees was in Ammia’s hair, on her face, in her eyes and ears. As she was pulled away from the hive, she screamed about bees stinging her under her clothes. We ripped off layer after layer and found bees that had somehow crawled under her jumper and shirts.

  But, a miracle of sorts, the bees were still quite dopey, probably thanks to the season. Instead of a swarm numbered in the thousands, as it could have been in summer, this swarm was probably only in the hundreds. Instead of crazy, psycho bees going absolutely mental at the thought of someone trying to raid the hive and attack their queen, suddenly becoming air-borne and suicide-bombing the interloper, they were still struggling to wake up and work out what was happening, more curious than furious. Once we’d scraped off hundreds of bees, expecting to find hundreds of stings, miraculously only a dozen or so bees had managed or bothered to bite the toddler. Still, if you know how much one bee sting can hurt, imagine more than ten at one time.

  Ammia’s screams subsided into sobs. But for the adults— aware of Genie’s recent allergy discovery—the fright and alarm remained. So it was off to the medical centre with Ammia, while her elder sister Rebecca stayed with us.

  Childhood is a strange time. You often feel neglected if you’re the one who isn’t sick—who doesn’t get the attention when your sibling breaks their arm or has a spew in the car. It’s easy to feel like you’re invisible when your sister gets looked after in a special way, even if it’s because she’s hurt. So while Ammia was at the medical centre, to console Rebecca we took her to a local café and let her choose her treat. A big slice of chocolate hazelnut cake and plenty of fresh cream. And a big mug of hot chocolate on the side. There’s a reason you don’t let kids do all the ordering. And the reason became even clearer when Rebecca threw up most of her chocolate indulgence across the table and over the floor.

  We felt we’d given Rebecca all the attention she should need while her parents were at the doctor’s, getting good news about Ammia (thankfully she wasn’t allergic). But soon we realised that too much attention can be just as big a problem.

  Having a hive, while presenting some risk, means you can harness your own sweetness from the farm. It’s not like we can grow our own sugar cane (though we could, in theory, give sugar beets a go . . .). We love the idea of that too but, well, we’ve been a bit busy lately, and with honey, bees do most of the work. Honey is also more complex in flavour, easier to extract in your kitchen, and could even be better for you.

  Generally, and sadly, our bees are left a little moribund as we concentrate on the animals and plants and all the other projects that need more constant attention. Instead of building more and more bee boxes to pile on the hive, places where the bees can store plenty of honey in the flush of blossoms over spring and summer so that we can then harvest the surplus, the bees are a bit neglected. Without the space to expand and store their excess honey, the hive prepares a new queen, who heads out surrounded by a mob of workers and drones. This is the classic swarm, and how new colonies of bees are born. The new queen and her swarm fly straight up and cluster together, perhaps around a tree branch, while a posse goes off to find a new home and establish a new hive.

  In our own special way, we’ve contributed to the beekeepers nearby; because we don’t build new boxes for our hives, our bees swarm a lot. And whenever there’s a swarm, our neighbour will collect it and use it in his hive or those of his friends in the valley.

  Duane caught the first swarm from our hive in a cardboard box. Dressed in the official beekeeping gear, which to a city boy looks like a suit you’d wear inside Fukushima’s nuclear reactor, Duane sawed off the whole branch and let it fall into the box. A tricky thing to do, methinks. Before they knew it, the bees were somewhere else entirely, and flew out of the box to find a perfectly suitable home, which happened to be Duane’s hive. In this way, we’ve managed to keep some freshness in the hives around Cygnet for a few years.

  Frustrated, I think, by our lack of beekeeping skills, Duane has helped us out a lot with our bees. He topped our hive with more boxes for the bees to fill with honeycomb, and he even came over to help spin the golden nectar from our last mob. We hired a centrifuge honey spinner, set it up in the house and harvested the joyous liquid from about four bee boxes.

  The way to get honey from a hive, if you’re not Winnie the Pooh, is to take the thing apart and use a hand-operated centrifuge to spin the honey out.

  Let me tell you about spinning honey. Bees just love to hang around while you do it because, of course, the smell of honey brings them from everywhere—it’s much easier to grab honey and bung it in your hive than to make it out of pollen. So you need a flyscreened-off area, or do it at night. And when you spin honey, a little bit of the molten sticky gold gets on your hands. On the buckets and tubs. On the knife you use to cut the tops off the honeycomb so the sugary sweet liquid can spin out. On the floor, the drawers, the ceiling, it seems. Everything and everyone gets coated in a fine layer of, frankly, quite delicious but generally quite tacky and annoying honey.

  The results are worth it. Once you’v
e had the real thing, sucked from the honeycomb or drizzled into jars with the telltale crown of wax and bee legs floating to the top, you’ll be smitten. Cold-extracted, unfiltered honey tastes like our farm. Ours also has that light scattering of very fine wax and pollen on the top, a signature foam. On that same day we also spun honey from two other farms that are not far from each other. One honey was almost lemony, with citrus hints; the other warmer, mellower and more caramelly.

  We now have a permanent jug of honey on the table, with one of those little lace covers usually reserved for drink jugs. A drizzle of honey is never very far away, used on yoghurt, on muesli, on sourdough toast. It flavours our puddings, our pre-bedtime hot milk and our fruit.

  We sell a bit of honey, always cold-extracted, at the small artisan food shop Nick and I opened in Hobart. A lot of people ask what that means. Like olive oil, any heat used to remove the honey from the hive will reduce the quality of the end product. And like olive oil, the quickest and easiest method of removing honey is to heat it, a lot, meaning it’s harder and more time-consuming to cold-extract honey, hence its cost is inevitably higher.

  Last season Sadie and I did a definitive taste-test of how heat affects honey. Some of the honeycomb fell apart when we tried to spin the honey out, and instead of ending up with a bucket of relatively clear, if thick, liquid, we ended up with a load of broken honeycomb wax with some honey stuck in it. The way to get this out is simply to heat it. The honey sinks, the wax melts and floats and, after you let the honey cool, you can scrape a plug of hard cold wax off the top.

  So, from the one hive we had two different honeys. One cold-extracted, and one extracted with heat. And the difference? Textbook, really. The flavour of the heated honey was simpler. It tasted, on first mouthful, less sprightly (perhaps less acidic— honey is vaguely acidic), yet very similar to the cold-extracted one. But as I rolled the honey around in my mouth, the difference was clear. The heated one fell short. It was pleasant, but not earth shattering. The cold-extracted honey was complex. The flavour built as you tasted it, reaching a crescendo about 30 seconds after licking the spoon. It lingered longer too, with exotic floral notes and boundless other hints that the heated honey had lost. This enormous difference in flavour, simply because of the way it was treated.