The Dirty Chef

by Matthew Evans

  6 tablespoons caster (superfine) sugar

  150 g (5½ oz) fresh or frozen pitted cherries—use sour cherries, such as Kentish (morello), if you can

  1 tablespoon coarse semolina

  icing (confectioners’) sugar, for dusting

  Keep your filo pastry under a vaguely damp teatowel so it doesn’t dry out as you work.

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

  Working really fast with the filo pastry, lay out a sheet with the short edge towards you and, using a spoon held vertically in the oil, then twizzled about, dribble and spot with a bit of oil, not a whole lot. Sprinkle evenly and quickly with about 3 teaspoons of caster sugar. Lay the next sheet 2–3 cm (¾–1¼ inches) to the right of the first so it overhangs. Oil and sugar as before. Lay the next sheet 2–3 cm (¾–1¼ inches) to the left of the original, and oil and sugar that too. These overhanging bits will fold in to hold the cherries in the strudel. Lay the next three sheets of filo in the same order on top of the original sheets, one by one, oiling and sugaring and overhanging as you go.

  Scatter the cherries over the closest one-third of the pastry to you, leaving the little bit of pastry on the edges without cherries. Sprinkle the cherries with the semolina and roll up, starting with the base closest to you and folding in the 2–3 cm (¾–1¼ inches) edges at the same time so the cherries don't escape. Roll tightly until the strudel is completely rolled up, with the loose edge underneath. Brush the top with a tiny bit of oil and transfer to a lined baking tray. Bake for 20–35 minutes, or until well browned. The trick Hristina taught me was to press the pastry and feel it crisp in layers, not soft and squashy under the surface; that way you know it’s done.

  Cool well, slice, then dust liberally with the icing sugar and serve. The strudel is crisp the same day; the next day the pastry will soften, but be just as good.

  Goose

  Death. It comes around so suddenly on the farm. Sometimes you see the Grim Reaper’s scythe looming. Like when the turkeys were big enough for the cooker. Other times, like when Maggie got sick, it’s just a shock.

  Free-range is always a risk. Piglets can get crushed by their mums, or taken by a hawk or eagle or perhaps even dogs, I’ve heard. Chooks can be disembowelled by a tiny but ferocious quoll. One quoll in the coop after dusk can decimate the flock, leaving carnage everywhere, tearing out the throats of every bird. I’ve been on farms where that’s happened, but it thankfully hasn’t happened here, yet.

  One way to protect chooks is with a goose. Apparently. If they respond well to the flock, a good goose will act like a guard dog. So I got geese as a trial, just to see what they were like. Geese have a bad reputation around here, particularly with Sadie, who told me she doesn’t like them alive, because they hiss, and isn’t particularly enamoured of them when they’re dead. She’d rather eat something else. In fact, she didn’t really like the turkeys alive, either, but she did like them after they’d been in the oven.

  I’ll tell you about our geese, but first I need to give my apologies to the turkeys.

  Yes, I did find you creepy. I did find it difficult, having to show you where to find your food in the morning. Every morning. I did sometimes resent having to herd you back in from the road at least four times a day after I’d hear cars skid on the dirt as they braked, trying to miss hitting you. I did struggle to love you as immediately, as unconditionally, as I did our house cow. Or the pigs.

  I apologise, because in the next life, turkeys, you tasted simply delicious. Truly great. Like turkey should taste and never does. Your meat was moist, flavoursome, tender and naturally sweet. Your skin browned up to lacquer-like brownness, your bones made a great stock. It was like the flavour of all the turkeys I ever wanted to eat rolled into one. I don’t like commercial turkey meat. But I did love eating you.

  So, with turkeys as my reference point, I took on the geese with a much more circumspect emotion. If they didn’t work out, they didn’t work out. If they didn’t taste good, that would be one experiment not worth repeating.

  The geese didn’t disappoint, on all sorts of levels. They did escape from their paddock within a day of being put in it, of course, much like the turkeys, so I’m not sure how I’d go using them to guard the hens. They did take up residence on the dam, which is where I really didn’t want them to be. But they did look quite regal on the water, and they didn’t annoy Sadie and hiss at her anywhere near as much as she imagined they would. And they did, in the end, taste bloody good.

  First, however, they had to die. There’s no other way to put it. To become meat, they had to stop breathing.

  I find killing birds inordinately bad. I don’t like the chopping of the neck, and hate the plucking and gutting of any of our fowl. At least with the geese, Ross came and did the shooting for me so I didn’t have to swing the knife.

  If you think plucking chooks or turkeys sounds bad, you should try geese. A water bird, the feathers are seemingly impossible to loosen. I dry-plucked them first. Then I blanched them in water a lot hotter than I’d use for chooks, complete with a tiny drop of detergent, to help get the water past the obviously well oiled outer shell of the feathers. Each goose took an hour to pluck, and I was very glad I only had two.

  Brined and smoked, though, these birds were ridiculously good. The deep dark meat nothing like chicken, or duck, or, for that matter, turkey. All are good, but goose is, from my limited experience of fattening and cooking them, great.

  I still find I have to shower straight after cleaning the birds, and I don’t want to eat the meat for a couple of days, at least, after doing the deed. It’s the smell of them, mostly of the feathers, that does it. But if this meat—birds with real, inherent, complex flavour—is the end result, and the only way I can get it is to rear and kill the birds myself, I’ll probably keep doing it.

  Tomatoes

  I bought my first tomato plants before I even moved to Puggle Farm. Propagated and sold by a nearby Steiner school, the young plants boasted varieties such as Paul Robeson (named after the famed yet vilified baritone singer from the mid-twentieth century), Black Krim, Tommy Toe, Amish Paste, Climbing Camp Joy and Yellow Currant, a tomato so prolific that the person writing the culture notes reckoned she almost got sick of eating them by season’s end. After I’d made an offer on the farm, I simply had to buy plants that promised great-tasting homegrown tomatoes even though I kind of doubted I’d be able to get them in the ground in time. As it turned out, I never did, but I did give them to others who—I hope—enjoyed their heirloom harvest.

  Tomatoes hold a strange place in my heart. Growing up in Canberra, the only vegetables I can recall surviving in our parched, hot clay soil were carrots, which were a bit woody; cucumbers, the old watery sort that you got pretty sick of pretty quickly; and tomatoes, which I’d eat like they were apples. I ate them that way because the flesh was melting and sweet, the skin was thin, and because they were quite simply delicious.

  But as we all know, the taste of tomatoes has been hijacked by the system. Nothing compares to the taste of a really ripe tomato, one that has a fine skin, plenty of jelly around the seeds and a sun-kissed perfume. Nowadays, when tomatoes are grown to be shipped a long way and stored a long time, the emphasis is not on taste but on how to gas a green tomato to make it appear pink. Even so-called ‘vine-ripened’ tomatoes are usually grown in water or are bred to appear bright red while never actually gaining that mouth-watering umami flavour of the real deal.

  I think tomatoes are in my DNA. Maybe there’s something odd about the place where I grew up. My hometown, Canberra, at the time of self-government, was the home of the Sun-ripened Warm Tomato Party. After I left, I spent years trying to perfect my passata making, in the absence of an invitation to any Italian sauce-making day. In Sydney, while my own crop of tomatoes in the community garden was annihilated by grubs, we held parties to celebrate the boxes of fruit friends and I bought from hotter, drier climes inland.

  It’s really no surprise therefore that tomatoes hav
e featured heavily on our menus, thanks to Puggle and now Fat Pig farms.

  Tasmania, at least our corner of the state, is marginal growing country for some things. Eggplants, apparently, are a real challenge. Chillies do well in hot houses, and sometimes outside if you’ve got the right microclimate, but not as well in the open air. We can ripen corn, just, and tomatoes? Well, some years are better than others. Last year they had to cancel the local tomato competition at the wonderful Middleton Country Fair because, well, nobody had any tomatoes in time.

  This most recent season, however, was a cracker. A long, hot summer that led into a warm, dryish autumn produced a bumper crop. Sadie had propagated any number of varieties and we used every available jar in the house to preserve their fruit. We used up two whole rows of garden beds to grow gobbling-sized Broad Ripple Yellow Currant and Paul Robeson, large reddish pink Soldackis, Black Russians, loads of Romas and Thai Pink Eggs for sauce, and three new varieties that had just passed quarantine, which we helped to propagate in a project instigated by the botanical gardens: Azoychka, a large yellow; Crnovic Yugoslavian, an enormous red beefsteak; and the tiny Sweet Pea.

  We sold 60 kilograms of green tomatoes to a local pickler. We ate tomatoes by the handful, both in the garden and in the kitchen. By the time the season finished, right at the end of April, I was just about sick of tomatoes.

  And of course, the largest crop was still on the vine. Those bloody Broad Ripple Yellow Currants simply wouldn’t stop fruiting. Right now, a few months post-tomato season, I’m still recovering from the excess.

  But give it a few months and I’ll be craving the flavour of a slow-ripened tomato from our own plot. And you can bet, as usual, next October I’ll be very keen to plant a Yellow Currant.

  Potatoes

  Tasmania shouldn’t, by rights, be called the Apple Isle. It should be called the Potato Isle. The state grows not only a lot of potatoes, but also a lot of excellent potatoes. My friend Michelle reckons (to her husband’s embarrassment—g’day Leo!) that she would’ve moved just for the potatoes if she’d known how good they were before she arrived.

  I’m with Michelle. While there are many, many good things about living in Tassie, you wouldn’t be disappointed if you’d moved for the spuds. At so many meals, especially when I first arrived, the potatoes blew my mind. Yes, the free-range pork was wickedly good, but the potatoes were sublime. Yes, the aged venison nearly gave me goosebumps, but it was the South Arm Pink Eyes that rocked my world. Okay, so the abalone was intense, the sea urchin remarkable, but what about those Dutch Creams?

  I could tell potatoes mattered in the local area even before I’d eaten them, just by looking at the menu at the local bistro, The Red Velvet Lounge. There, the ‘old school chips’ were promoted as coming from Mal Dance’s potatoes. Now, I don’t know Mal Dance, but I do know Dance’s Road is in Cygnet and something tells me that Mal might grow a pretty fine spud somewhere not far away. The bistro sure made a mighty fine chip with them, I have to say.

  On my first full day in my house I cooked spuds. I reckon they were just Coliban, the standard washed supermarket variety. The nicest thing you can usually say about them, eating-wise, is that they look very white and unblemished when clean. That’s why supermarkets like them; they look nice. Growing wild among the weeds in the overgrown garden, they were a bonus crop that found its way onto the dinner table when I discovered them. And remarkably, only minutes out of the ground, they were brilliantly sweet, buttery and, while simple in flavour, tasted bloody good.

  Spuds are always on the gardener’s mind around here. I could tell because shortly after moving I found a local hardware store boasting nine varieties of ‘seed potatoes’, the disease-free spuds you plant. We have now grown potatoes, intentionally, a few times over the years (and a few times unintentionally). At first I put them between the apple rows in my netted garden, only to find them very hard to dig up and harvest once the apples started to sprout leaves and grow again after the winter dormancy. A few errant spuds self-seeded, and the occasional plant still pushes its way up between the espaliers.

  In our second year we planted a no-dig bed, the kind of potato bed where you use potash and straw (we used old hay simply because we had some) and grow the spuds on some new ground where there could’ve been lawn or a bed of weeds. That first no-dig bed was outside our too small, netted garden; after all, nothing eats potato leaves, right? Wrong. The native wildlife seems strangely immune to the toxins in potato leaf. They didn’t just nibble, either. The entire harvest was cut down to virtually nothing when the potato tops vanished into the tummies of our local fauna.

  The next year we tried the same no-dig style bed in a corner of one of the pig paddocks. Four rows of potatoes had a good northerly aspect, very rich soil fertilised directly from the pigs, and a strong start at the end of a moderately wet spring. But the summer proved too dry, there was no easy access to water to keep the plants strong, and at least once the pigs got in and did a bit of damage. I discovered that spuds, despite their ability to thrive in an overgrown garden, or in the compost heap, or where you no longer want them, could really struggle where you do want to grow them. They are such a bloody weed that between all our makeshift beds we did manage to harvest tiny potatoes to keep us fed. But nothing like the glorious varieties the neighbouring growers sold at the local greengrocer, Cygnet Garden Larder.

  Finally, in our new possum- and wallaby-proofed garden at Fat Pig Farm, we planted six rows of spuds: King Edward, a stunning white-fleshed variety that is brilliant baked and not too shabby at all in mash; Dutch Creams, similar to a Nicola, with their yellow, creamy-tasting flesh; Pink Eyes, a Tassie variety with a fine skin that is at its best freshly dug and eaten simply boiled or steamed; Pink Fir Apples, those wonderful elongated spuds that you can simmer in a stew for ages without them breaking up; and Cranberry, a good-tasting pink-fleshed variety which we put in just for the sake of it. Sometimes you just want pretty things in your life, even if you do own a farm. We have also harvested the magnificent and previously unheard of (by me) Up-to-Date, with stunning results.

  That first year at Fat Pig, we put the Pink Eyes in as early as we could—potatoes don’t like frost, and both our farms are a little frost-prone—hoping for a decent crop ready for The Taste festival in Hobart. My idea was to sell pork buns, Fat Pig Buns we called them, where the meat was slow-roasted with garlic, fennel and rosemary, for $10, and have a bigger option for those who wanted a more substantial meal. The Big Fat Pig Bun (try saying that after a couple of Tassie chardonnays and it’ll feel like a Dr Seuss tongue-twister) came with slaw and potatoes. The cabbages for the slaw we bought in (we forgot to plant them in time—they take months to come good) while the spuds were to be cooked in pork fat and scattered with local truffle salt.

  Problem was, two weeks out, and the potato plants weren’t looking too flash. Around here they say if you’re lucky with your planting and your land, you can harvest fresh potatoes just in time for Christmas. The Taste starts each year between Christmas and New Year, so it was fingers crossed.

  We had a go at bandicooting around the crop. Bandicoots, those gorgeous banded marsupials that poke holes in our yard each evening, have lent their name to our own act of poking little holes in the soil or mulch around the spuds. The idea is that by bandicooting you can pull up a few potatoes at the edges without having to dig up the whole plant. Anyway, bandicooting around the spuds confirmed my fears. The potatoes we’d planted for The Taste were still the diameter of a ten-cent piece. They simply weren’t going to be ready in time.

  I rang Marty Brereton. Marty is a bit of a legend around these parts. He’s the bloke whose big machinery can dig a trench or slash a paddock or knock up a fence. He’s the fella with four strapping boys who, between them all, can wire up your house, dig in your septic tank, build your shed and bring in several thousand bales of hay. Most of it in a day. Marty’s the bloke who ran a slaughterhouse on the next road from our house while being the local butcher for t
wenty or so years. He’s also the man to see when you want a Lucas Mill, the mobile mill of note, brought to your property to cut up some timber.

  In his spare time, Marty grows spuds. (Though I don’t imagine Marty having much spare time.) Marty had never let me down. Not when we had to dispatch a pig at home. Not when we had to fell a big mongrel of a tree. Not when we had to disc the paddock that would eventually become our garden at Fat Pig Farm. But Marty is hard to pin down. After you get off the phone, you’re never quite sure if you’ve made an arrangement with him. You kind of suspect he’s got ten people in his ear about jobs he’s promised to do, all of them wondering exactly when he’ll swing in the gate like a modern-day knight on his steed (or his John Deere), ready to face the dragons (or build you a stockyard). It’s a rare day that Marty ever goes inside before dusk. The year before, he’d rung me back about cutting my hay two months after I first flagged it with him. Noble, yes, but about a fortnight after I’d already brought the hay in. Marty doesn’t let you down, but he’s also trying not to let down a whole bunch of other people.

  We have found the human connection in business here quite a different experience from Sydney. In Sydney, if you had a tradesman come and do a job, it was just a job. Here, it’s more than just a job. The bloke you get in to help build a shed is playing badminton with you on a Tuesday night. The man who rewires your hot water system is the son of the bloke who cuts your hay. The woman who teaches you to hand-milk is related to your neighbour who grows the most amazing array of vegetables. Your chocolatier babysits your kids. Your garage attendant has a permaculture-based farm that you’re invited to visit. We are very much in and of a community.

  Sure, there are always some who run businesses, even around here, that have a casual disinterest in—or perhaps an active disdain of—their customers. It is, after all, a very Australian thing to work in customer service and not like people. But mostly, perhaps because we’re drawn to them, the people we are surrounded by are those who see us as flesh and blood, not just a walking wallet.