The Dirty Chef

by Matthew Evans

  In Italy the term pizzaiola implies a tomato and basil sauce, here using smoked cheese to add intrigue and mystery, though you can use ordinary mozzarella too. Vegetarians can replace the veal with chargrilled or baked eggplant, which is probably just as yummy.

  1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

  1 large onion, chopped quite small

  1 tablespoon fresh parsley, chopped

  2 garlic cloves, crushed or sliced

  400 g (14 oz) tomatoes, chopped (use tinned out of season)

  salt and freshly milled black pepper

  4 veal cutlets

  olive oil, extra, for brushing the veal

  about 10 basil leaves, torn

  roughly 20 g (¾ oz) smoked mozzarella cheese, sliced

  bread or rice pilaf, to serve

  Heat the oil in a heavy-based frying pan and gently cook the onion and parsley until soft. Add the garlic and cook for another minute. Slurp in the tomatoes and simmer for about 10 minutes, or until it reaches a sauce-like consistency. Add a touch of water if it starts to dry out. Taste for salt and pepper.

  Brush the veal with some oil, season with a little salt and pepper and fry in a large frying pan over a high heat until cooked to your liking.

  When ready to eat, add the basil to your tomato sauce, then place the veal in the pan. Top each cutlet with the cheese, cover and allow the cheese to melt a bit.

  Serve hot with bread or a simple rice pilaf.

  Pulled pork

  When Sadie and I first bought Fat Pig Farm, our vision was to try and give people an edible experience of the place, at farmers’ markets, food festivals or possibly even open days on the farm. And to that end, we needed a commercial kitchen.

  I spoke to Nick about how much it would cost to build a kitchen on Fat Pig Farm, because he’d had to do something similar at the cheesery on Bruny Island. I talked to him after we’d bought the place. Obviously. And his jaw hit the deck. The amount we’d budgeted on would get us, just possibly, a commercial septic system and power to the site. No building. No water tanks. No wiring. Not even a carpark. And certainly no washable floors and walls. Definitely no coolrooms, ovens or stoves.

  And so the dream for a commercial kitchen onsite at the farm nearly went up in apple-wood smoke. Until a mobile kitchen came on the market. The only problem was, it was in a caravan. A very short, 1980s caravan, where the only place that I could stand up fully without having to slouch or bend my head was under the skylight. The good thing was that it was nicely decked out with all the stainless steel and under-bench commercial fridges it could fit. It was cute, in that rounded, retro kind of way. And it was fire engine red, which for some reason made it even cuter. It also had a gas stove and hot water unit, three sinks and a serving hatch that opened up on one side. In other words, a pretty snazzy food van.

  At the time I didn’t know that some movement, where highflying chefs were getting into food ‘trucks’, was underway on the mainland. And I didn’t know that American food—things like sliders, po-boys and pulled pork—were on the fashion radar too. The problem with being fashionable is that if you’re in fashion one minute, you’re out of fashion the next. The last thing we wanted was to be in, or out, of fashion.

  In our secluded valley, however, we didn’t hear all those things. All I knew was that my budget could cover a food van, and that Ross, who had lived in the US for some years, could make pulled pork. What’s more, Thomas Beuke, the smallgoods maker who was making my saleable salami (as opposed to the stuff we make ourselves for home consumption), was a native of Germany, and he knew how to make the best knackwurst around. Knackwurst is a proper, hot-smoked frankfurter, and can be made from the pork that doesn’t go in salami. It’s almost a by-product of salami-making.

  So now we had the van, we had the pigs and we knew what to do with them. All we needed then was a food festival or two. And Tassie does food festivals really well. I might’ve applied very late in the piece, before I’d even bought the van, but Launceston’s big foodie fair, Festivale, had a spot for us. All we had to do was show up. Which was harder than it sounds.

  A quick run to the servo two days before the event taught me a thing or two about reversing a caravan. On a narrow dirt road. On a hill. With hydraulic brakes. With a tree across the road on the only corner where I could turn. It also had Bill, the mechanic, replacing the bearings and the tyres, which had a 400 kilogram rating. For a 1.6 tonne van.

  In the final hours before we packed the van, Ross and I had three goes at towing the heavy beast, with different cars. Believe it or not, it was my, ahem, very flash 1989 Navara that was the vehicle of choice, when there was little choice. And then Ross and I were off. The farm ute struggled its way north, towing the van, occasionally dropping down to second gear to get over the hills, making a strange clunking sound as we went. And blowing a bit of black smoke, too. It performed admirably, considering.

  The Fat Pig logo was slapped on at the last minute, as Ross and I drove to the event. The bread was warm in the bags when we picked it up. The cordials (organic strawberry and rose geranium, raspberry and elderflower, rhubarb and bay, and red currant and mace) were a folly with no serious thought given to how to serve them. All we knew was that our knackwurst with homemade mustard and homemade tomato sauce tasted great. So, too, Ross’s American-style spiced barbecued pork, marinated, slow-smoked, shredded and shoved in a bun. All we needed were a few customers.

  The Navara chugged its way to Launceston, getting us there just in time. Because we were a late booking, we’d been tucked off to the side of the main festival. Next to the famed and interminably popular tempura mushrooms. And the longer the queues got for the tempura mushrooms, the less you could even see our van, let alone get to it. And then it rained.

  So we felt lucky to get any customers. Though we had just enough to make the trip worth it.

  The caravan has been both a blessing and a curse. We’ve used it for several events, not least a few picnics and long-table lunches on the farm. We even took it north again for a truffle lunch for A Common Ground. A great idea and highly functional it was, too, until the drive home was interrupted.

  At first I thought someone driving past recognised the van from Festivale. And then, as their waves became more frantic from the front seat of their car, we realised something was wrong. Smoke was billowing from the hubs, and my new tyres, while rated to be able to hold the weight of the van, were nearly alight.

  Turns out the hydraulic brakes were seized. A $400 towing fee later, and more than a grand in repairs, and the brakes were fixed. I’d like to say we made enough money from the lunch to cover my costs. But we didn’t. Luckily we’ve done a few festivals that have made some coin. Though the van’s still a long way from paid off.

  Our regional produce events company, A Common Ground, has hosted about ten events so far, but as we work on our individual projects, and after Nick and I opened a shop of the same name, the events slowed to a bare trickle. Blame Fat Pig Farm if you like. Blame Nick’s Churchill Fellowship, or Ross’s new business, Bruny Island Food. Blame livestock and families (Ross recently had twins), or simply blame bad management. Or blame that physically and mentally crushing event on Flinders, because somehow we just haven’t been able to keep up the momentum.

  We did, however, manage to come together to host a meal to launch our joint cookbook, The Gourmet Farmer Deli Book. It was in a terrific space above the shop in the Salamanca Arts Centre. The location had a commercial kitchen, running water, electricity, and was completely sealed from the outdoors. We didn’t have to carry platters through the rain, or over a cliff, or jog 600 metres to pour someone a drink. It really was the easiest event so far.

  Though, when I say easy, we still had to have some challenges. The tables were 110 paces and a flight of stairs from the kitchen. And my foot was giving me gyp. Ross reckoned it was a bruise from wearing gumboots too much, an occupational hazard around here at the end of winter. It hurt. Really hurt. Especially after about twenty tr
ips from the kitchen to the dining room that Saturday night. By the end of Sunday I could hardly walk. Then I found the cause. A shard of glass over a centimetre wide had been working its way into the ball of my foot. Once it was out there was less pain. Carrying feed to the pigs, including Tinkerbell, who’d only just given birth to twelve slips a few days before, still involved some uncomfortable heavy lifting and walking, but in comparison it seemed like a doddle.

  We are but animals. Weak when injured. Strong when well. There’s a fragility to life. Tiny things can make us suffer, or make us unwell.

  In one week, I witnessed the birth of pigs, had a lamb die in my arms, fed 60 people and ignored obvious pain in my foot because that’s what you do when you’re busy. My farmer’s life can play host to a lot of the big things in life in a short space of time. Birth and pain and joy and death. Constant themes when living close to the land.

  Mushrooms

  Don’t do it. That’s the simple advice for those interested in picking wild mushrooms for the table. People die. Some end up on dialysis. Others just end up very, very sick for the rest of their lives. Some mushrooms must be cooked. Others are safe to eat at one point in their life cycle but not at any other time. There are mushrooms that react with alcohol to make you crook. And some people have a sensitivity to a certain type of mushroom that others can eat with impunity.

  Unless you know what you’re doing, DON’T PICK WILD MUSHROOMS.

  So, of course, I love going foraging.

  Most autumns, we see quite a few mushrooms poking their heads above the soil around here. They tend to come up while the soil is still warm, but after the onset of some autumn rains.

  For a while, shortly after I moved to Puggle Farm, it seemed I’d become a mushroom farmer. The things that grew best on the property in my first autumn were Slippery Jacks that forged their way through the ground under the trees lining the road. With their spongy gills, golden tops and affinity for pines, I knew they were edible. More than edible, Slippery Jacks are fantastic, even if they are a poor cousin of the famed Cepes and Porcini. I dried some, leaving them in the sunroom on wire racks after wiping them clean. Once dried they became complex, intense, with a mouth-watering aroma. While mine were drying, I couldn’t sit on the couch in the sunroom with a glass of elderflower cordial without wanting to cook up a mushie omelette.

  There were many other edible mushrooms around, too, for those who knew what they were doing. I found plenty of shaggy Parasols pushing up through the paddocks. There were also some shaggy Ink Caps, sometimes called Lawyer’s Wigs because of their rounded conical shape. These need cooking and I don’t eat them when I’m drinking alcohol because, well, the combination will make me sick. These mushrooms contain the same chemical they give to alcoholics to put them off the grog.

  Further down the road are Saffron Milk Caps, a vivid orange ’shroom that bleeds a golden latex when cut. Milder in flavour than some, but sturdier in texture, these I braise down with beef, or flavour with plenty of parsley and some garlic and bacon. You can’t dry these, because the latex turns to rubber and the mushrooms become more resilient than a dog’s chewy toy.

  The reason we had so many mushrooms that first year was the rain. It bucketed down at just the right moment in the season, overflowing the water tanks and soaking the paddocks. Field mushrooms sprang up in the grass, flourishing while there was still warmth in the soil. It was the best mushrooming season in years, I found out later, a quirk of the weather, and one I made very good use of. I still have a jar of dried Slippery Jacks, which I pop into winter soups.

  A few years later, after a less rainy autumn, Nick and I had to venture further afield than my paddocks for our foraging. We were both parenting (I learnt that term very early on after Hedley was born—you don’t ‘babysit’ your own child, you ‘parent’ them). Foraging, like fishing, is just a great excuse to get out among it. To throw yourself out into the world. Nick and I just loved hunting for wild mushrooms, and the good thing was we could let our kids free-range in the bush while we did it.

  We found a dense forest of pine nearby, drove in through the open gate and spent a couple of hours scouring the forest floor for Slippery Jacks. Even found a few, but mostly the pine needles were littered with poisonous varieties. For a forage, it was unsuccessful. As a day in the woods, and as a picnic, it was magnificent. Some leftover sourdough baguette from a dinner I’d cooked the night before; salami, ham, a couple of cheeses; cherry tomatoes, apples, pickled onion relish. A dry spot on a creek bank with glimpses of glade in a couple of directions. Our boys ran amok up the creek, under the trees, the sound of their play filling the forest with joy.

  So it was a bit of a bugger to find the gate we’d driven through locked when we returned. Not just locked, but seriously locked, with a padlock the size of a lumberjack’s fist and a chain you could anchor the Titanic with. The end of the road had steep banks to the side that you couldn’t drive up, down or over. The chain was threaded through the gate, so even if you dismantled the whole thing, you’d never be able to drive through without seriously damaging the car. Whoever fixed this gate had obviously seen a few gates broken open in their life (or perhaps had broken open a few gates themselves) and this certainly wasn’t going to be one of them.

  With two tired toddlers in the back seat, and Nick’s daughter waiting to be picked up from school, time was getting away from us. We looked for an escape route. We bounced up every other conceivable road in the forest. And a few that looked ill-conceived. Most seemed to be logging roads, where big four-wheel drives and timber trucks had carved ruts of deep mud in the hollows. More than once I thought we’d get stuck. And the locked gate, it must be said from our lengthy and exhaustive drive around the forest, was the only access, and exit, point. No wonder it was firmly fixed.

  What to do? A simple forest walk at lunchtime had turned into a late afternoon headache. How to explain, if we were discovered trapped in the forest at the main road’s edge by the owner of the lock, that we didn’t realise it was private land? That the gate we drove through seemed inconsequential (invisible, even, I must admit) when open, and insurmountable when closed?

  I rang my neighbour. You can usually rely on a long-time local to know the lay of the land, and Rob was a bloke who I hoped might know the area where we were stuck. In an instant he knew the property, and by sheer luck knew the name and number of the bloke who owned it. Perhaps he could persuade the owner our intentions were honourable? All we needed was understanding, and the key to the industrial-sized padlock, and all would be right. Except the bloke who owned the joint lived in Hobart. Thankfully, though, it turned out the key was closer than that. An old-timer, George, had been in the forest that day, collecting a bit of firewood, and locked the gate on his exit. George had noticed firewood being stolen from the property, and was making damn sure none disappeared on his watch.

  When he showed up, George wasn’t a complete stranger to me. Cygnet’s a small town, and I’d already had dealings with the fella’s grandson. George had taught his grandson to box. If we’d been loaded up with firewood instead of fungi, I doubt George would have let us out of the gate without a boxing lesson or two ourselves. Instead, he seemed to find it a bit funny that two grown men had snuck into a private property to pick wild mushrooms, of all things, and ended up locked in. He smiled warmly as he let us out, and told us to throw the mushrooms away.

  ‘They’re poisonous, those things,’ he muttered, looking at our mushrooms as he reshackled the lock on our release. ‘I don’t know why you’d want to eat them.’

  And unless we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t.

  Roasted mushrooms with sage and pancetta

  Serves 4

  Roasted mushrooms taste pretty damned good with pork fat and sage. They’re even better if you put them on bread.

  2 tablespoons bacon fat or pork lard

  1 kg (2 lb 4 oz) Field mushrooms or Swiss Brown mushrooms (because you shouldn’t forage for wild ones . . .)

&nb
sp; 1 fresh bay leaf

  3 garlic cloves, crushed

  2 slices pancetta, cut into small pieces

  about 20 sage leaves

  bread, potatoes or soft polenta to serve

  Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F/Gas 4).

  Melt the fat in a roasting tin. Toss in the mushrooms with the bay leaf, garlic and pancetta. Throw in half the sage leaves and roast for about 20 minutes, tossing a couple of times as they cook. Add the remaining sage and roast for another 10 minutes, or until the mushrooms have become tender and dark and aromatic and terrific.

  Serve as part of a meal, on bread, over potatoes or (one of my favourite ways) on soft polenta.

  Salami

  ‘Are you drunk, or can’t you reverse a trailer?’

  It may sound harsh, but that was the voice of the local abattoir owner, David Stephens, and he was actually coming to the rescue. My missus Sadie was, for the first time ever, reversing a trailer. Having spent a week trying to entice the last porker into it, and truck it the ten minutes or so to the cutting shop, the last thing she needed was to be learning a new skill. David’s droll sense of humour covered the soft heart of a man who has made killing his trade. He may’ve made a joke of Sadie’s reversing, but he was the one who got in the car, backed up the trailer for her and helped get the sole pig out of the trailer and into its pen. You’re lucky to find that level of personal service at a greengrocer these days, let alone at a privately run abattoir where they’ve got their hands quite full with the job most of us don’t want to do.

  David and Rita Stephens were the owners of our local, family-friendly abattoir. I, too, learnt to reverse a trailer at their Cradoc slaughterhouse with David yelling instructions from in front. The Stephens, and now their successor, James Lord, would see any number of small-holders and serious farmers each week at the stockyards that grace the grim end of the business. You drop off your animals at one corner of the bunker-style concrete building, and pick up the meat from the other, with the personal service that epitomises all the good businesses around here.