The Dirty Chef

by Matthew Evans

  Not everything we do works. Our corn is a bit hit-and-miss, some hardly fertilised so the cobs look a bit like they’ve been half-eaten by a child. We haven’t exactly managed to get a thunderous crop of artichokes, despite their close relatives, the thistles, thriving just outside the gate. And our beans in our first year, well, let’s just call them a work in progress.

  We still have to fight the slugs for every seedling—we lost nearly all our peas in spring and all our autumn carrot sowings. The parrots chomped our first spindly asparagus shoots, which means the asparagus bed is set back a year. We compete with the birds for our meagre harvest of strawberries, and the bandicoots have moved in which means the possums may not be far behind . . .

  One day, though, we hope to grow enough to justify the purchase. And eventually pay off the driveway.

  Sautéed kale with browned garlic and bacon fat

  Serves 4

  Kale is much sweeter after a frost, so we usually wait until late autumn before harvesting. It’s mild when young, but we like to blanch older kale before eating. This works well with Red Russian or curly kale, and is okay with the softer Cavolo Nero, too, if that’s all you’ve got.

  1 big bunch kale, well washed and hard central ribs discarded

  2–3 tablespoons bacon fat or other lard or even dripping from roast beef

  6 garlic cloves, finely chopped

  Place the kale in a large saucepan. Heat about 2 litres (70 fl oz/8 cups) of water in the kettle, tip it over the kale and put on the heat. Bring to the boil, then turn down the heat and simmer for about 5 minutes. Actual time will depend on the age and type of kale. Test that it’s tender. Drain it really well, and shred with a knife.

  Heat the fat in a large heavy-based frying pan over a medium heat and fry the garlic, stirring occasionally, until it goes a very pale gold colour. Work quickly or the garlic will burn. Add the kale, stir it well and put the lid on the pan, then let the flavours meld over a low heat for about 5 minutes.

  Serve hot with any kind of meat, or even with dishes of chickpeas and pumpkin and the like.

  Saffron

  There are a couple of things that we will never grow. I don’t think I need to grow wine grapes, for instance. Nor saffron. Both for different reasons.

  The reason for not growing wine grapes on a mixed farm is probably fairly obvious to people in the industry— they’re a proper job all on their own. Having watched my vigneron neighbour over the fence tend his vines, and grapple with pickers and the idiosyncrasies of each vintage, I reckon grapes look like hard work. The other reason is that while we have been trying to establish our farm as a mixed operation, replacing fences, putting in water pipes, building sheds—in other words digging holes and throwing in $100 notes—my neighbour has been digging holes and throwing in two or three $100 notes. Farming isn’t a great way to make a living, most of the time. It’s a bloody fantastic way to make a loss. Wineries, traditionally, are the best way ever to make a loss. The way to make a small fortune out of a winery is to start with a large fortune. There’s a reason why dentists and lawyers and the like are attracted to wineries. The off-farm income is high enough to offset any losses. Forget the romance of the vines; I can look over the fence and get that. And if I want the romance of the vines, bottled and made into pinot noir that I can drink at my dinner table, I’ll get that from my neighbours too.

  The other thing I don’t think we need to grow on our farm is saffron. Firstly, my saffron comes from just a few paddocks away. Yes, commercially grown saffron in Australia was first harvested only metres from my front gate and still comes from just up the hill. And secondly, if you’ve ever seen a saffron harvest you’ll know that it helps if you’re an orang-utan to pick it. If your arms are longer than your legs, you’re much closer to the fine-leaved croci, the crocus plants that barely nudge through the earth before flowering. And at well over six foot tall, my legs are much longer than my arms, and my knees aren’t very good at crouching.

  Saffron is the world’s most expensive spice. It comes as three thin stigmas in the flower of a particular variety of crocus plant. The flowers have to be harvested early in the morning, often at sunrise, and ideally before the flower opens. Then the stigmas are removed gently from the flowers and dried, before being packaged in tiny glass vials or packets and sold. It takes 250 000 flowers to get 1 kilogram of saffron. No wonder it’s expensive.

  So when my neighbour told me that they harvested 40 000 flowers the day after Nick and I were filmed helping to pick a paltry few hundred, I am eternally glad it’s them doing it. Imagine all the picking, even as a team, then taking all the flowers inside and, one at a time, using tweezers and gloves to de-stigmatise them (or whatever the term is). Then you’ve got to dry the threads and package and sell the stuff. They deserve every penny.

  I’m quite a fan of saffron. Ridiculously priced, but rightly prized, it is at its best in simple things. You can use it to flavour homemade egg pasta. I like to poach pears in it in the season. The trademark astringency is insanely good in rice; a simple risotto or pilaf is lifted to the gods with a few threads of the spice, but a paella is arguably the best way to show off its golden goodness.

  On Gourmet Farmer we showed how you could flavour vast wheels of a raw-milk cheese using the stuff. At home you can simply scatter a few threads into fresh ricotta a day before serving. Or mix some into homemade mayonnaise with roasted garlic and leave overnight. I’ve used local saffron in an apple teacake recipe, the signature fragrance pervading the batter. I use it in soups, with lamb, and with dessert.

  I get a real buzz using top quality saffron grown in the Huon Valley. I just won’t be planting it in my garden anytime soon.

  Apple and saffron teacake

  Serves 8–10

  It’s best to soak your saffron overnight, to extract as much flavour as you can. In a pinch, you can do it for a few hours, or even heat some of the milk with the saffron to speed up the process.

  generous pinch of saffron

  185 ml (6 fl oz/¾ cup) milk

  75 g (2¾ oz) butter, softened

  225 g (8 oz/a bit over 1 cup) caster (superfine) sugar

  3 eggs

  300 g (10½ oz/2 cups) self-raising flour

  1 teaspoon natural vanilla extract

  3 medium apples, preferably a cooking variety, cored, peeled and cut into wedges

  60 g (2¼ oz/ 2/3 cup) soft brown sugar

  ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

  pouring (whipping) cream, to serve

  Soak the saffron in about 1–2 tablespoons of the milk, overnight if possible.

  Preheat the oven to 170°C (325°F/Gas 3). Grease and line the base and sides of a 22-cm (8½-inch) springform cake tin.

  Beat the butter and caster sugar in a bowl until pale and creamy, then beat in the eggs one at a time. Fold in the flour, the remaining milk, the vanilla and saffron (including the saffron’s soaking milk) and stir until just combined and evenly textured.

  Pour the cake batter into the greased tin and evenly dot with the apple wedges.

  Mix together the brown sugar and cinnamon and sprinkle over the top of the cake. Bake in the centre of the oven for about 30–40 minutes, or until a skewer inserted in the cake comes out clean.

  Allow to cool in the tin for 10 minutes, remove the tin, cool completely on a wire rack and serve with pouring cream.

  Veal

  Cari is a farm dog. An ebony-coloured Kelpie, she isn’t comfortable in town. Or in the house. She likes to roll in muck and eat pig poo and chew on the enormous bones left over from the animals we rear. She’s used to paddocks and livestock, not trucks and crowds. She also likes to be patted. A lot. And have her tummy rubbed. A lot.

  But instinct is instinct and if there’s a sheep, a turkey, a chicken, even an enormous cow hanging around in one of the yards, she’ll have a go at rounding them up. As a pup she nibbled my heels as I walked, as she would a sheep during a muster. Now she’s nearly five years old, she will still stalk her prey, crou
ching down, black as a panther and svelte as a springbok, trying to get up close and bring them around.

  Kelpies are working dogs. If they’re well trained, and kept bored when they’re not working, they can be marvellous at rounding up sheep. Cari, because she’s a home dog, has a great life. She will come, mostly, when called, though her herding instinct is hard to manage. If I’m moving Priscilla, our new house cow, into a different paddock, Cari will razz her up, not round her up. Let her in with the chooks (or, more accurately, after she rakishly finds her own way into the orchard with the chooks) and she may scare them so much they take flight onto the neighbour’s farm. Or perhaps, like the bigger Buff Orpingtons, just ignore her. When I gave her a chance to hang around with the turkeys, well, the turkeys would just leave the yard a little earlier than they usually did. With the sheep, Cari is always on alert, though the ram’s horns, and the tough attitude of the ewes, mean that she rarely gets her way.

  The most curious thing the dog does is bond with other animals. For a time I’m sure she thought she was a pig. She’d run along the fence with them. She’d play with them. She’d try to join in their feeding frenzy each morning and evening.

  Coco, Maggie’s first calf, also had an identity issue; she thought she was a dog. At least sometimes. When left alone for too long, Coco would start to chase the sheep, a manoeuvre she had learnt from Cari. I first saw it from the sunroom—the flash of white, as three ewes and the ram darted across the top of the paddock. I immediately thought of the dog and cursed myself for leaving the gate open. But right on the back of their hooves, instead of an escapee coal-black Kelpie, was an adolescent cow, all legs and hips waggling, in hot pursuit. I’m not sure why the sheep would take off, or why the cow liked to chase them, unless it was all in good fun. Just like the dog, however, I doubt Coco would have known what to do if she’d ever caught one.

  If Coco was a bit of a Kelpie at heart, Bobby, Maggie’s orphaned calf, was worse. With no other role models than us and the dog for his first few months of life, Bobby would take his lead from Cari. He learnt very early on to round up sheep. He learnt to energetically race up to us in the paddock, and he learnt to expect a head rub and a tummy rub on approach. All of which seems just fine when the steer is the size of a large dog. But give it a few months, a year, two years, and the horns have grown, the steer has grown and yet the attitude is still one of playful insouciance. Bobby is like a very large, very dangerous Labrador, complete with licky tongue and affectionate head nudges. The difference is that now he can really hurt us when all he really wants is a cuddle.

  We’ve had a few challenges with calves. Priscilla’s calf, Wilbur, wouldn’t suckle. Some calves just can’t.

  Wilbur was born at 4.30 am one autumn day. In the predawn dark he looked black and white like his father, a Friesian. But in daylight the next morning we could see he was more of a wonderfully deep dark chocolate colour. Priscilla lay down only a couple of times during labour, mooed gently in the night, and ate between contractions. The birth took only a matter of minutes, from first seeing Wilbur’s front feet coming out, to the calf hitting the deck, covered in a film-like shroud from his shoulders to the end of his nose. Priscilla licked this off and he kicked and breathed for the first time and Sadie and I hugged tightly as we watched new life grace the farm. To say we were nervous, after the death of Maggie, is an understatement.

  The birth had gone well, thank goodness. But that was the good bit.

  Wilbur wouldn’t drink off his mum. When we noticed he wasn’t suckling, the all-important time for colostrum was passing him by. Colostrum is the magical, high-fat, antibody-laden first milk that only comes in for the first 48 hours or so. If a young animal doesn’t get colostrum, it’s inevitably poorer for it. We noticed, a few hours after the birth, that Wilbur wasn’t frolicking, or even walking much. He was listless and skinny. Apparently a lot of calves are born with a poor suckling reflex, and Wilbur's was at the bottom end of pretty damned poor. The outlook for calves that show this behaviour isn’t all that good. Many die before they learn to drink off their mother, and most of the information on the problem involves using a tube to get food into the calf’s stomach, how long they can go before the first feed, and what happens if they don’t drink. What often happens is that they die, apparently.

  We watched as he toyed with her teats, but realised after a day that he simply wasn’t drinking, and hence started to falter instead of thrive. I got him to latch onto my finger, painted with molasses, and tried to swap it for the teat. I spent the day on the job—milking a feisty Priscilla to feed Wilbur, while using three different bottles and two different teats, and forcing him to swallow when he wasn’t interested. I became accustomed to straddling him to lift him up off the ground so he could be bottle-fed safely, a sack of bones that felt as heavy and cumbersome as a bag of spuds. We were already in the habit of stroking his throat, trying to initiate what should be a natural instinct and pressing his head up near his mother’s teats so he could smell the milk as we sprayed it onto his face. Watching the life drain from a young calf, having had both piglets and lambs die in my arms, was no easy thing. So it was a huge relief when Wilbur finally drank off his mum, though we still don’t really know what triggered the change.

  It should have come as no surprise that Wilbur wouldn’t suckle. Our son did the same when he was born, though there’s a lot of expert help in a hospital for a human baby. Out on the farm, we had help from Aiden the local dairyman. From Elsie the legendary owner of house cows for many decades. But what eventually worked was nature. We managed to get about a litre of colostrum into Wilbur’s tummy in that first 36 hours, and the rest he did himself. He found his mother’s teats, somehow decided that suckling was a wonderfully satisfying thing to do, and quickly learnt the characteristic head-jerking movement to help let Priscilla’s milk down. His belly looked full straightaway. Within minutes he was gambolling. A day later his coat gleamed, his body had filled out and he could easily outrun Cari.

  Priscilla, Bobby and Wilbur were the first livestock to move to Fat Pig Farm. Within days they were joined by a half-dozen Lowline Angus, a pocket-sized, dedicated meat breed. And days after that, quite a bit before their due date, the Lowlines started to calve.

  We didn’t pick up the signs of impending birth like we might have with our more familiar Jersey cow. Dairy cows’ udders are huge and tight and shiny in the days leading up to birth. Lowline Angus udders don’t change much at all. Doing a head count on the new farm, I ticked off seven dark heads, not six. Poking from the grass, with ears too big for it, was Freddy’s head, with a calf’s gorgeous face.

  We needed to ear tag and mark (castrate) Freddy before he became too boisterous, and hence too hard to handle, something most people do in the first few days. So, being new to this game, we promptly did it early the next day. What we didn’t know is that the process of grappling with the young calf and tagging him could affect the mother/child bond. Cattle, like most mammals, have an incredibly strong imprint formed just after birth, a lot of it driven by their sense of smell.

  As we let Freddy out of the stockyards to go find his mother, Desley, she shoved the youngster aside; she was a cow intent on finding her newborn calf, one that didn’t smell like he probably did after being handled over much of his body. She stomped around, sniffing Freddy from time to time, but acting strangely disconnected from him.

  We watched, anxiously, while for two days she occasionally groomed the calf, yet kept nudging him away from her teats. Because we work the farm, but live elsewhere, we couldn’t watch all day. We weren’t sure if Freddy had been allowed to drink from her, or if there was something broken in the relationship post-tagging. On occasion, Desley would leave the rest of the herd and spend time mooing as if calling for a lost child.

  In that first two days, Freddy seemed strong, but we never actually saw him suckle. That’s because he didn’t. By the time he was weak enough for us to carry, things weren’t looking good. Instead of leaping away, Fred
dy let Sadie pick him up in her arms. She carried him up to the place where the trouble began, up to the stockyards where we’d tagged him.

  Desley was still anxiously searching for her son. I’d read tales about how to establish a bond between cow and calf, like collecting some of the mother’s urine to pour over the calf. As odd and kind of gross as it seems in print, on the ground anything that might help becomes a real option. I also knew, from our experience with Bobby, that we could bucket-rear Freddy using milk from a nearby dairy if need be. But we also knew it would make our lives easier if nature worked the way it should. Freddy had suckled before we’d tagged him, and although I know how I’d feel about being castrated with a little rubber band on the scrotum, farmers do this all the time. Yet somehow our actions had broken the fragile thread of instinct.

  Back in the stockyards, locked up with nowhere else to go, Desley paced and sniffed every inch. She knew that’s where she had left her son. The calf that she’d rejected for two days in the paddock was then suddenly at her side, found in the place she’d lost him, recognised and allowed to drink his fill. The maternal connection was in place once more. Instinct took over and the new boy quickly regained his strength to become as feisty as a puppy, sturdy as a brick and completely thrilled to be back in the fold.

  It was a great result, and even better, I didn’t have to collect a bucket of urine to help achieve it.

  Veal pizzaiola Serves 4