The Dirty Chef

by Matthew Evans

  Hens we had, but mother hens? Well, not really. And we weren’t all that good on the dads, either.

  Roger, the original rooster from my first flock who was spared from the pot because I favoured him over all his brothers, well, he lived up to his name somewhat, enjoying interludes with his coop-mates every day. But Roger seemed to be firing blanks. When the eggs from his watch failed to hatch not just under hens, but also in an incubator, Roger became coq au vin.

  The next rooster came from the neighbour. Pedro was a big, bold, brassy Buff Orpington. He was like a teddy bear—all girth and grand, but a bit of a wuss when it came down to it, ineffective if there was a real threat to his girls, I thought. Until a young Plymouth Rock proved otherwise.

  Now, roosters are very territorial. If there are girls around, they go at each other often, fighting, pecking and sometimes flying crazily at their opponents. The dominant rooster is the one with its tail intact and its pride firmly in place. When a younger rooster starts to get tickets on himself, and perhaps take an interest in the older bloke’s flock, well, fights often ensue.

  So I have a sneaking suspicion Pedro might’ve king-hit the Plymouth Rock. One day the black and white barred Plymouth rooster was looking handsome and strong, and almost ready to start crowing, and we were preparing a separate coop for him to share with a few of the younger girls. The next day he was stretched out dead on the floor of the coop. Pedro strutted around nonchalantly, as if to say, ‘Nothing to see here.’ I can’t help feeling this sudden death, of a rooster on the cusp of adulthood, may have been due to a blow to the side of the head. There were certainly telltale marks to suggest it was so.

  As I said, our record with roosters isn’t great. Not only did we have an infertile Roger, and a short-lived Plymouth, but soon after that Pedro fell off the perch, figuratively, too. We suspect it was snakebite, but without an autopsy it’s hard to know. And so now we have Gordon to carry the flock.

  Our record with hens has also been mixed. Apart from an egg-bound Barnevelder (a shocking and usually fatal illness where the eggs back up behind one that gets stuck at or near the chook’s cloaca), and a couple of deaths from old age for chooks we adopted, there haven’t been many problems with illness. But we have had trouble breeding them. We really wanted to let the chooks do the hatching and rearing, so we could keep the reek from the house and the responsibility from our door.

  So it was fascinating to see two feral chooks, who appeared from nowhere and began to eat our pig food, do much better in the baby stakes. One of them, a tiny little feisty Bantam, vanished for a time (I feared she’d been taken by a quoll) only to return three weeks later with eleven chicks. But as they slept rough, and we know quolls frequent our yards, one by one the chicks disappeared. Eventually, there were none. And one day, the mother hen also vanished for good.

  The remaining feral chook, a Bantam-cross by the look of her, started to venture further and further into our farm. She’d sneak in behind our flock and eat our chicken food, but she’d always return to the trees at night. She’d branch-hop and branch-hop higher and higher to safety. Until she was a good 6 metres up a pine tree.

  Bantams are known as great mothers. If you want broody hens, those who will sit well on a nest, bantams are your bird. So when this last feral went missing again, but in the height of the egg-hatching season, it was far less of a surprise to have her reappear with a dozen chicks. Yes, while our fattened, fussed over, purebred birds had safe housing and a steady supply of grain, grubs and grass, and could still only hatch two or three chicks from a dozen eggs, Feral Florence could pump out twelve. In the rough. It was such a delight and surprise to see her shepherding her brood near the chicken coop that I suddenly came over all maternal myself.

  In an effort to prevent Florence from losing her chicks like her former tree-mate, I locked her up in a spare chook shed with her brood. Safe from quolls and with ready access to all the grain they could need. I felt that responsibility that most farmers have, to guard animals in your care.

  But, no. About three days later, on the longest day of the year, when there was still light in the sky at 9.30 pm, I went to lock up the chooks and Florence was missing. All twelve of the chicks were safe and in the shed. But Florence? She was gone. I scoured the coops, the sheds, the bushes. Eventually I found her, neck torn out, a victim of a quoll even before the day’s proper end. Our first and only quoll attack from the chicken coop and it had to be the new mother.

  So twelve chicks again became our charges. We kept them under the heat lamp. We had to clean out their cage on a regular basis, then also clean out the shed they shared when they grew too big for the cage. It was our job to teach them where to sleep, and to try to get them to eat. But they’d inherited their mother’s need to range. Every day they’d come through the holes in the fence to the house garden to feed. They’d scratch up the yard, the driveway, the mulch around the rhododendrons. They’d drink from the dog’s bowl and peck and unearth the rhubarb crowns. For three months we had a dozen slightly wild, quite rangy chooks of nondescript origins causing havoc in the yard. Without a mother to rein them in, they were just like all youngsters without boundaries—all play and no care. And before long, they started to crow. At least some of them.

  These chooks really got to me. The damage they wrought. The workload they added. The fact we didn’t want a dozen orphans yet had to take charge of them once Florence had gone. What’s more, we didn’t need any more laying hens, so they were all for the chop, and I get a bit narky when I have to kill anything, let alone a dozen birds at once. Especially skinny ones like these.

  Once they’d been through the killing cone, however, and put into the cooker, my mood sweetened somewhat. Thanks to Florence, our allocation of chicken meat for the year had increased by a multiple of five. Killed young enough to be moist yet old enough to have flavour, those slender feral birds made excellent roasts and even better coq au vin. Braised to tenderness in a blend of chardonnay and pinot noir, with batons of home-cured pancetta, they make the famed French poulet de Bresse seem like an also-ran.

  It’s almost enough to make me forgive them for the damage they did to the yard and the extra work they created around the farm. I could just about imagine rearing a dozen chicks under the heat lamp again. Except I can still remember the smell.

  Coq au vin

  Serves 4

  You can hardly make a chicken dish with Australian red wine and taste the chicken. Most of our chicken is light on for flavour, going from the egg to the pot in about 35 days. Add to that the fact that the big, oaky, tannic and fruit-driven styles of red wine that Australia specialises in aren’t just food unfriendly, they’re bad news for cooking.

  So local white wine is fine; in fact, it’s more desirable for coq au vin. Just be sure it’s a decent wine, preferably not from a cask, but not worth too much money either. And definitely one without too much oak. I’d use a riesling or semillon, but a chardonnay or even a sauvignon blanc can be very good. Pinot gris (grigio) can be a little too austere, but give it a go. Or water down your red wine with half white, if that’s more the style you want.

  You don’t need to have those tiny pickling onions that all the old recipes call for. They’re almost impossible to find, and a nightmare to peel. I couldn’t be fagged, but if you do bother, they do add a nice other level and make the dish just a little posher.

  1–2 tablespoons butter

  100 g (3½ oz) speck

  1 large free-range chicken, cut into 10 bits

  3 onions, diced

  1 carrot, diced

  1 small celery stalk, diced

  2 tablespoons plain (all-purpose) flour

  2–3 tablespoons cognac or brandy

  1 × 750 ml bottle white wine

  2 fresh bay leaves

  3 thyme sprigs

  salt and freshly milled black pepper

  250 g (9 oz) Button mushrooms

  pickling onions, peeled (optional)

  potatoes or bread, to ser
ve

  Melt the butter in a large flameproof casserole dish or saucepan. Cut the speck into little batons the size of a short carrot stick and fry gently until the fat all melts out. Remove the speck with a slotted spoon and reserve.

  In the same pan, gently colour the chicken until a lovely caramel brown. Remove and keep with the speck. Add the onion to the pan and cook gently until quite soft, then add the carrot and celery and cook for a couple of minutes longer. Stir in the flour and continue to cook and stir for a minute or two. The pan may get all sticky, but that’s okay, we’ll fix that in a minute. Pour in the cognac or brandy and wine and stir to get all the sticky stuff from the bottom of the pan.

  Pop the chicken and speck back into the pan, toss in the bay leaves and thyme, and add some salt and pepper. Put the lid on and simmer for 40 minutes. (I actually take commercial breast meat out after 10 minutes and put it back in right at the end to stop it going all dry and nasty.)

  After 40 minutes, put the mushrooms in the pan (and those peeled pickling onions you can never find or peel, fried in butter with the mushrooms to brown, for best effect) and simmer for another 20 minutes. Remove the chook meat, bring the sauce to a rapid simmer and let it get a bit more texture as it boils down. It won’t go thick, just a nice thin gravy consistency. Taste for seasoning with salt and pepper and return the chicken to the pan.

  Serve with baked, steamed or boiled potatoes or fresh bread.

  Cherries

  They say that when you stack hay too wet, it can heat up. If it’s stacked tightly, it can heat up a lot and—with the introduction of oxygen—spontaneously combust. Not a great thought to have when picking up heavy, occasionally green, sometimes quite wet-feeling hay on Christmas Eve. Not a pleasant thought at all.

  Some of our hay—in fact, most of it—was dry enough to bring in and safe to stack. But with rain forecast, and Christmas Day to be spent on Bruny, we didn’t want half our 500 bales left out in the rain. The hay carting had suddenly been brought forward two days, so all the plans of a barbecue and a team of people to help haul it in suddenly became two people in their late 40s (one of them me) and one in his late 30s. The 30-something with hay fever. A tough job suddenly became seriously hard yakka, to be done within a seriously strict time limit. Rain due by 8 pm. We started hauling and stacking at about five.

  We brought in most of the bales by the time it started spitting. But, exhausted and hungry, seeing the neighbour’s ute and trailer coming down the driveway, with two strapping young blokes riding on the back, was like watching the cavalry arrive just as we were about to retreat. Together we brought in everything that wasn’t too green, just as the rain struck. Heavy rain too. Fat, drenching drops that almost spoilt the Cygnet Christmas parade.

  It wasn’t the rain, however, that spoiled the hay. It was grass too wet to bale. It came from a stagnant paddock, which had uneven growth. There was also condensation rising up from the ground, and the only solution was to restack the pile to let in more air, to salt the bales to help draw out moisture and try to stop them going mouldy.

  But first, we had to get through Christmas.

  Christmas, since I moved to Tassie, is usually quite an indulgent affair. For the first few years we’d all pile into the cheesery kitchen on Bruny, roasting things in the woodfired oven, cooking lobsters in the giant kettle Nick had found at a garage sale, and whipping up syllabub or tiramisu with brandy-soaked cherries or raspberries and elderflower.

  One year, when I lost the entire ham order list for the market stall a couple of weeks before Christmas, Ross and I were left with a whole leg of gammon. Gammon is cured pork. It’s cured as if you’re making ham, but it’s not smoked or cooked, rather hung for a few weeks to mature a little. And Christmas, being somewhat of a tribal, slightly competitive affair between us boys in the kitchen, I thought I’d turn an error of organisation into a feature of the festive table.

  I poached the gammon with bay leaf and mace, then roasted it in hay, a tricky thing to do without setting fire to the woodfired oven. Thankfully it worked. Ross brought some insanely good slow-roasted goose, stuffed with a bit of its liver, though the potatoes underneath the bird were probably better than the bird itself. And that’s saying something. That year we had home-killed chooks. A wonderful rich roasted eggplant with a concentrated tomato sauce. Nick simply poached the lobster to have with homemade mayo, and pan-fried some prawns to go with it. There were some incredible biscuits. And, for pudding, cherry trifle.

  Summer is cherry season. We wait for it with bated breath, waiting for the signs to go up outside the cherry orchards. Sometimes the local orchards just sneak in a harvest before Christmas, other times just after.

  We’ve become a lot fussier about cherries now that we are surrounded by amazing cherry orchards. And Mary’s cherries, from just up the road, are as good as any I’ve had. My hands look like a faith healer’s as I pit them for my son, and the road up to the house must be getting lined with stones, as I spit them out the car window.

  Sadie and I have a game that you can only play during cherry season. And preferably in the old ute, not the nicer, newer car. Driving slowly up the road, windows down, we chomp on Mary’s cherries, spitting cherry pips out the opposite window. Giggling uncontrollably as the seeds hit us, the doors, the dash and sometimes even make it out the window. I’m bad at it. Sadie’s worse.

  My first cherry experience in Tasmania was also about spitting. Teaching Nick’s three-year-old daughter Tilla how to spit out cherry pips. Both of us sitting on the back step of Maria’s house in Hobart. Both of us getting cherry juice everywhere as we did it. And both of us with our shirts off, of course. I now cherish each summer, teaching my son to eat them in the same way.

  Cherries astound me. They’ve defied lots of attempts to get them to grow over a longer season, so there’s still this thrill of anticipation every year before the signs go up for farm gate sales. Then we have this joyous edible celebration of summer, knowing too well the season will only last a month or a little more. It’s still a pure experience of eating within the season, something supermarkets would have us forget, as they try to make everything available all year, with fruit flown in from everywhere.

  I read an interesting quote from a very successful farmer who sells to supermarkets: he said that the fresh fruit and vegetable market was all about shelf life and appearances. Perhaps he’s talking about the stuff he sells, not the stuff he (and I) would like to eat. Tasting a cherry that has travelled only as far as I carry it, on the day it was picked, is something else entirely.

  Not all the fruit we grow around here goes to good homes. Apparently the market for cherry juice is dominated by cheap imports from Chile, so all the reject export cherries (those that have a dimple in the wrong place, or a stem that’s too short, for instance) are simply dumped.

  I don’t fancy the crisp pink cherries beloved by the Japanese, though my pigs do. The amount I can get from a nearby sorting shed, for nothing more than a bit of bacon for the forklift driver, numbers in the hundreds and hundreds of kilos. It’s easier to measure the amount in tonnes. I don’t like to see such waste, so each summer I spend days shovelling cherries to pigs. The pigs clack around the seeds, gorging themselves on the fruit. Cherry-fed pork is juicy, sweet and amazing.

  Christmas is also raspberry season in Tassie. If you have a few canes, the rewards, come the end of the year, are extraordinary. Slow-ripened fruit with just the right balance of acid to sugar. I would like to eat my raspberries like Audrey Tatou does when she plays Amelie in the movie of the same name, slipping them on my fingers like thimbles and gobbling them off quickly in succession. But I’m afraid I like them riper than that, so usually they’re surrendering their juice into the bottom of the bucket and won’t slide over my fat digits.

  The year we had the wet hay, the raspberries on the canes were fat and heavy. But with Christmas lunch out of the way, the hay had to be sorted. By then, only a day after being stacked, when I plunged my hand into the middle
of the pile I could feel that some of the hay bales were already heating up.

  I pulled a hundred bales out of the shed on Boxing Day, laying them on an angle so they faced the sun. I’d pulled them out of the stack wherever I felt moisture or a build-up of heat. A quick trip back to the house for lunch and by the time I returned to Fat Pig Farm it had rained. Enough to moisten the tops of each bale. It was still raining as Sadie and I hauled them back under cover, but the majority of the original stack was still packed too tightly for safety. Marcus, the hay cutter, came by to help, instructing us to get the rained-on 100 back out of the shed, and helping restack the rest—keeping aside the heavy bales, those more likely to go mouldy, and concentrating on the dry ones. A few hours of shifting, of moving old pallets underneath to allow more airflow, and loosening the pile, and I felt older than my 46 years.

  It only took a minute, however, out on the mighty Huon River in the kayak, for the world to look much finer. As Sadie and I dipped the paddles in the water, with the Hartz Range in the background, the only sting left in the day was caused by the salty water on all the fine cuts on my hands and legs.

  Hristina’s cherry strudel

  Serves 4

  This stunningly easy recipe comes from Hristina, a wonderful cook and friend who lives in Hobart and harvests and pits her own cherries in the Huon Valley every January. If you’re using frozen cherries, let them half thaw only before using as they will leach too much juice into the pastry. A 375 g (13 oz) packet of filo pastry can make three strudels, each one serving about four people.

  6 sheets filo pastry

  grapeseed oil, for drizzling