• Turner’s Beach strawberries with goat’s yoghurt and Blue Hills honey
Ale and wine list
• 2007 Barringwood Park Blanc de Blancs
• Seven Sheds Kentish Ale from the keg
• 2008 Barringwood Park Northbank Chardonnay
• 2006 Barringwood Park Mill Block Pinot Noir
• Seven Sheds Razzamatazz (a raspberry, honey, wheat ale) from the keg
The only ingredients sourced from outside North Tassie were the salt, sugar and pepper. The lunch was $140 a head, drinks included.
Moving to Highfield was actually a blessing. Our striking location came with power, its own toilets and running water. We used uplights to show off the stone walls of the barn. A lot of very happy punters stayed until about 6 pm, including two day-trippers who just dropped by from Devonport, and quickly found themselves a room.
What we learnt, and fast, is the importance and support of locals. Charlotte from The Old Cable Station put us up, lent us her licensed food preparation van and fed us a couple of breakfasts when we most needed it. Craig, the octopus fisherman, lent us his coolroom trailer and supplied ice. Julian from the Stanley pub let us wash up our glasses, plates and cutlery in his commercial dishwasher after his own enormous dinner crowd had gone later that evening. And let’s not forget Graham, who helped us load and unload bundles of chairs and tables from the town hall. In his ute.
We were exhausted. Exhilarated. After sweeping, mopping and unloading all the furniture, I headed home. I needed to get a lot more done around the farm, including parenting. So Sadie reckoned. She handed me Hedley and took off to Sydney for a well deserved three-day break.
Mutton-bird
Flinders Island. We’d heard it was a majestic, mountain-studded blip of land jutting up out of Bass Strait. Unlike its more famous brother, King Island at the western entrance to the strait, Flinders goes about things quietly. Yes, the beef is superb, fattened on the salty pasture that fills the lowlands just as it is on King. The lamb is rightly famed, too, in particular the milk-fed stuff. And if you’re into game birds, there’s nowhere else in Australia I know of that boasts the variety of Flinders, in such numbers. But there’s no dairy on the island, which is partly why it’s lesser known.
Flinders Island, from the air, is pretty magnificent. Ancient granite cliffs and dramatic peaks, the land surrounded by vibrant blue water. Islands dotted everywhere—more than 50 of them in what’s called the Furneaux Group. Like most visitors, our first experience of Flinders was from the plane, providing a vista that just makes you wanna get out and among it.
Ross, Nick and I were on a mission to find a venue for another lunch. The idea was to expand our regional produce events further afield. The first, that washed-out paddock lunch in Tassie’s North West, had been a surprising success, not least because we had moved indoors to Highfield’s stunning old stone barn. And ultimately because Colette, Fiona and Shireen came riding up on their valiant steeds (well, in a Pajero) from Ut si Café.
Having driven six hours from home, having helped harvest half the food for the North West lunch, and done a half-decent job at it, we had the smart idea to really test ourselves and take the whole operation offshore. Flinders Island, smack-bang in the middle of the wild bit of water that separates Tassie from the mainland, seemed too good to be true. The council were supportive. We had some contacts on the island who could give us a few introductions to farmers and owners of ovens. On paper the island boasted a whole range of produce, both grown commercially and on a domestic scale, and there was something wonderful about the distinctly regional ingredients. I don’t know of anywhere else with the range of produce that Flinders boasts, from indigenous goose to mutton-bird, the famed local lamb and cockles (clams) from the seashore. We were dead-keen to find out if Flinders really did have all the things we needed to put on a big lunch.
On this exploratory trip, we scoured the island with a couple of locals—Raoul Harper, general manager for the council, and Mick Grimshaw, the deputy mayor—looking for the ideal location for a long-table meal. Up near Elephant Rock, we imagined setting up a table near the beach, with guests walking down from the rock itself, along the sand, through the dunes and up onto a spectacularly situated sheep paddock. On a still day, it looked the goods. But on the way back to the main drag, we noticed the trees all grew at an angle. A serious angle. The beach could get windy, we reasoned, and we’d seen it on a day when it simply wasn’t. We already knew that it helps to have a backup plan. The alternative shelter, nearby, was a charming old shearing shed that would need a few stalls moved and a good scrub-out before you could use it to serve lunch.
Other options included wonderful old barns. A patch of straight, disused dirt road in the middle of a cow paddock, overshadowed by dramatic peaks. A yurt tucked under the often cloud-swept peaks of Strzelecki National Park at Trousers Point. A really big old shearing shed in the centre of the island. A local hall that was kind of daggy and quirky but at least had running water and electricity. In the end it came down to a couple of locations that we reckoned would fit the bill—the sheep paddock near Elephant Rock, and a local mixed farm.
One of the defining features of Flinders Island is the self-reliance of the people. It’s not like Bruny Island, where there are ten daily ferries so you can leave for work, or to buy a lettuce, or pick up a part for your ute. No, Flinders Island is more remote. If there are no carrots for sale at the couple of shops that might sell them, there are no carrots in your diet unless you grow them. Locals have gardens and rely on them. They can build and make and fix things because they have to. And they have a council that is really well stocked with tables, chairs, marquees and all the trimmings needed to throw a party. It’s not like you can go to a hire company and get the stuff from them. At $300 a cubic metre, shipping anything to Flinders is pretty pricey.
We visited the local school, where they had a Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden set up. Jon, the local teacher, gardener and (apparently) juggler, met us and asked us exactly what we were hoping to use. He reckoned, with the kids’ help, they’d be able to load up the table with greens.
As backup there was another woman, whom I know only as the ‘Lettuce Lady’. We ran into her on a street corner, as you do on Flinders, and were immediately taken by her enthusiasm for green leaves. She reckoned she loves lettuce. loves lettuce! And she grew wasabi and chillies too.
We’d heard about a local bloke of Italian descent who supplied lots of the locals with eggs. There was a legendary beekeeper somewhere on the island, as well, a fella who harvested the much sought-after Manuka honey. There were commercial fishermen aplenty, who could snaffle us crays and abalone and garfish. There were two wineries, so we had a good choice of drink.
We met the local abattoir owner, and he offered to save some pork fat for us from any pigs coming through in the intervening weeks. We knew there’d be lamb. And beef if we needed it. While those wild turkeys and pheasants that we constantly saw as we drove the roads of the island weren’t for us (feral they may be, but not for commercial harvesting, apparently), if we applied for a licence, Ross could also bag a Cape Barren Goose or two.
Add in the local olive grove, and we were looking pretty much sorted.
One of the ingredients we’d heard a lot about before heading to Flinders was mutton-bird, the strongly flavoured local seabird that is harvested commercially by Indigenous birders. Sometimes called yolla, or shearwater, there are about 23 million breeding pairs that frequent the islands, mostly around Flinders but scattered around the rest of Tasmania too, migrating from Russia to breed here, then flying back again, covering about 15 000 kilometres each way. Every year Tasmanian mutton-birders, commercial and recreational, take around 100 000 young birds from their nests.
Now, I know some might find it repugnant that young birds are snatched from their nest and killed before they’ve had a chance to fly. But if you eat chicken meat you’re on no moral high ground. Mutton-birds are in fact older, and poss
ibly more physically mature, than the chickens you buy commercially. And as I’ve said before, if you eat meat, most of what you buy isn’t actually mature, so mutton-birds, who at least aren’t fattened in anything other than natural circumstances, are little different ethically. Chickens, the commercial sort, are given routine antibiotics. Their life is far from natural. And it’s just as short. If mutton-birds can be harvested sustainably, at least they’ve had a natural life. I, for one, don’t have a moral problem with them. So long as you like the taste.
Mutton-bird, for the uninitiated, tastes a little like what it eats. And it eats a lot of small oily fish. It’s in the fat and skin that most of the fishy taste and smell is trapped. Imagine a duck that has been injected with a pretty healthy dose of anchovy oil underneath the skin, and you’re not far off the mark. To those who grew up with them, mutton-birds have a flavour to be savoured and craved. To those who didn’t, they’re often considered, well, yuck.
I didn’t have a point of view before we first ate the birds, slow-grilled over flames on a barbie at Mick’s shack at Killiecrankie on Flinders’ north west. I watched as the famed fat dripped from the birds and caught alight, a self-fuelling fire that threatened to ignite the birds themselves, each drip becoming a fiery torch. It’s a juggle to cook the birds without creating an inferno. For a minute I thought we’d end up with cinders for dinner. Instead, the birds that came from the coals— once the fat had rendered and the skin crisped—were indeed gamey, indeed fishy, but they were also terrifically good to eat.
Killiecrankie is a magical spot, a curved, sheltered bay of pure aquamarine water, fringed with a big grin of white sand. At one end there are orange lichen-stained rocks where the locals store their curiously triangular, wooden cray pots, not far from the scattered shacks.
Sitting on these rocks in the late afternoon light, beer in hand, we were convinced, probably thanks to the warm welcomes and the ingredients we found. Flinders Island had all we needed for our next A Common Ground lunch. We picked a date, settled on a venue and started to put out word of the feast.
We went home again, ready to advertise the lunch and plan the trip. There seemed a surfeit of local produce to choose from. But ultimately what we would serve would be up to the island, its seasons and its people to decide.
The first booking enquiry came from someone who lived off the island, with a request for a discount, and the words, ‘It’s a bit expensive, don’t you think?’
Yes, $170 was a lot to pay for lunch. But this was a big lunch, including wine, and we simply couldn’t make the numbers work any other way. All the infrastructure had to be brought in to the location, except for a stove and a barbecue. We spent six days sourcing and harvesting things from all over the island. We shipped a pallet of large cooking pots and all our platters and serving gear from home, which wasn’t cheap. Add in the cost of the food and wine, along with staff and transport, and there wasn’t a lot of room to move on price.
But this first enquiry wasn’t a good sign. If people flying in didn’t want to pay $170, what would the locals think? Mick was pretty sure they’d struggle to come at that price. Our first A Common Ground lunch at Stanley needed about 80 diners to turn a working profit and we only managed to lure about 70 people in the end. Our expenses on Flinders, albeit ameliorated by some free accommodation from a mate of a mate, and the loan of a car, were huge. The actual expenses of putting together the lunch were exacerbated by filming, which meant that the sourcing of food and equipment took three times as long as it should and there was no time to cook for ourselves. All up we probably spent $1000 at the local tavern, pub and bakery just on our own meals.
In the end, however, it turned out that the locals, and the interlopers, were happy to pay the price. I don’t know if our meal was worth $170 a head, but if we didn’t charge that much, we simply couldn’t have put on the event.
About two months after our reconnoitre, with the time fast approaching for the lunch, we took the easy option. Instead of a windswept beach, we chose a kitchen, a house, a bit of shelter from the wind. Partridge Farm had all of those. Only rain could spoil the day.
Rob and Lorraine Holloway were the hosts at Partridge Farm. They made our own dabbles in self-sufficiency look meagre. A result of their location, their desire and their capacity for doing things themselves, Rob and Lorraine were inspirational. They had a pantry full of things they’d grown and preserved in jars. They had a larder full of cured meats. And they had a freezer chockers with fish they’d caught, animals they’d reared, vegetables they’d grown. They even had their own meat room with a mincer, a cryovac machine, a long brazier inspired by a trip to Italy, and a rack for meat hooks. Rob and Lorraine also have ‘his and her’ pantries—his with innumerable pieces of fish and meat, cryovac’d and frozen; hers with homebrew, Fowlers bottles full of fruit, olives, tomato sauce and more. They hunt in the season, and have their own orchard and their own vineyard to make their own wine. They age cheeses they buy in from Pyengana (sometimes for up to three years), dive for crayfish and abalone, and make their own sausages. When we were there, it was a while since they’d had a pig, but they’d reared them in the past and would again, at which time they would make their own bacon and ham.
So, while the pantry was stocked (mostly with things we couldn’t serve to paying guests), the set-up was perfect. Even better, for us, was that Rob and Lorraine were up for the challenge of having a hundred or so people lob up for lunch. I wonder now if they actually knew the damage such a crowd could do to their farm. Rob slashed the paddocks in preparation, so the guests wouldn’t have to wade through long grass; he dug a firepit, albeit on the far side of a deer-proof fence from the table where our guests would sit.
We cleared out their cooking gazebo (including the heaviest chair I have ever moved, a dentist’s chair) and transformed it into a full camp kitchen, complete with stoves and barbecues, and we brought in a trailer-top woodfired oven. The menu was inspired by what came from Partridge Farm and across the island. We organised the special licence to shoot Cape Barren Geese, which the local abattoir was able to process. We found two breeds of local lamb. There was venison. There was a trip to find cockles on an outlying island, on a temporary permit that Nick had organised for this one-off occasion. And I went to find mutton-birds.
It was an early morning boat trip to a temporary settlement on Big Dog Island, where Indigenous mutton-birders set up camp every April. Kids ran along the shoreline, smoke drifted up lazily from the campfire, and a posse of workers and their families was busy collecting mutton-bird oil from the chicks’ crops and plucking and butterflying the birds for sale fresh or curing in salt.
To harvest mutton-birds, you have to put your hand down into the nest, a long dark hole in the ground. The kind of hole, all the experienced birders will tell you, that tiger snakes like to hide in. The trick, apparently, is to feel if there’s any warmth in the hole and to pull out if you think there’s no chick inside so you don’t get bitten. I gave it a go, crouching on my knees and putting my whole arm into the inky blackness of a hole in the dunes. Suddenly, I felt a sharp prick on my finger. I leapt about 10 feet in the air and my heart stopped. Instead of a snake, it was merely the peck of a bird. My guides fell about laughing. I let them get the rest of the 200-plus birds we’d need for the lunch.
Because Flinders Island had impressed us so much on that fleeting first visit, and we were going to be away for more than a week, Nick, Ross and I had all arranged to bring our families. But not until a few days into the week, so we’d have time to forage, film, and find our feet.
We hit the ground running. When we’re filming, everything takes much longer to do. The need for us to actually do work, and the need for the film crew to watch us doing work, are often almost mutually exclusive. Our intent was to put on a good lunch for those who had trusted us enough to fork out $170. The film crew knew that everything going smoothly wouldn’t make for good telly, so they didn’t mind if things weren’t going to plan. Tensions
ran high. Particularly when we started looking for produce.
Ross, Nick and I scoured the island for the goodies we had been promised. The eggs were no longer available, due to some petty licensing issue to do with a small farm selling eggs to the local nursing home. The olive grove had no oil left from last season, and no olives, either. None of the pigs that had been through the abattoir had been big enough to save any fat. The cockles we found were small, and small in number. We drove hours just to get spuds. Even the school came up short; Jon the Juggler and his team had battled the weather, and the promised load of greens was severely limited.
Luckily, we did get the lamb. And Ross, with his hunting ticket, was given the job of not only bagging the geese, but also a few wallabies. While it had initially been just a small part of the menu, now we were really relying on him to make the kills.
Generally, we work well as a team. Nick has the ideas, and is good with logistics. I tend to take over where Nick is dreaming, trying to turn things into reality (he’d say I was the negative one, I’m sure). And Ross is the bloke we turn to when we need a barn transformed into a commercial kitchen that can turn out entrees for 100 people like magic. And generally, despite our strengths and weaknesses, we get along really well.
But when we don’t, we really don’t. This time, we had the film crew with us from dawn to dusk, and were under a lot of pressure to perform for such an expensive lunch. I was also feeling uptight about our dwindling menu choices. That, and the weather was steadily worsening as the week went on. Nick and Ross didn’t want to discuss other options besides the paddock at Partridge Farm. They simply blanked out the possibility of rain. For me, a sodden event was worse than a misjudged main course. Sadie, when I spoke to her on the phone, reckoned I was as stressed as she’d ever heard me.
One of the great things about filming is the crew’s organisational skills. We had Nicola Hawkins, a researcher for the show, who had lists of everybody with their contact details, maps of how to find them, and what they were helping us with. When things got busy, I even started putting pressure on her to help organise this lunch; like Max and the other crew, when she could help, she did. But I was still extremely tense about how the event was going to come off.
The Dirty Chef Page 19
