Year in the Valley
Page 5
Bryan’s asparagus omelette is more discreet – a lovely bright yellow thing with dots of green oozing juice out onto the plate. You only get that colour of course with your own eggs.
The chooks eyed us thoughtfully from their dust baths under the casuarinas as we brought the asparagus over in a plastic bag, hoping that we’d brought stale bread, which usually gets delivered to them in plastic bags, but we hadn’t, so they wriggled down again, into the gritty sand and decomposing casuarina needles – one of the most fragrant dust baths around.
Tried the new cream mix on Gabby. She seems more comfortable with it. I wish she’d take to the wombat hole though – wombats need the perfect moist humidity of wombat holes. I wish she’d graze more too. I tried cutting down her food but she just got thinner and unhappy.
The kiwi fruit are leafing out the window – their pale leaves are almost silver in the sunlight. They’ll darken soon. The pergola will be shaded again and we will breakfast there in the green light and the leaves will shade the kitchen and in the morning the bedroom light will be dappled, leaf prints on white walls.
Asparagus Omelette
3 eggs
1 generous tablespoon butter
1–6 asparagus tips, very finely chopped (only precook if the asparagus is bought, not if it’s fresh)
OPTIONAL
cold chopped potato (make sure it is very dry and cold or it will stick)
a scatter of garlic chives or salad burnet or tarragon
a scatter of soft red capsicum, sliced so fine it’s almost transparent (if you’ve been tempted to buy one – there won’t be one ready yet in your garden in October)
grated cheese (for a really solid meal)
Heat your frying pan before you do anything else. If it isn’t hot the omelette will stick and you’ll get scrambled eggs, or alternatively raw and singed, not a lovely thing firm on the bottom and creamy on the top. I use an old cast-iron pan – smooth from a thousand oilings – my hand knows the weight of it now, I can flip it and wriggle it without thinking, know just how long a bit of meat will take to brown. You need to form a good relationship with your frying pan – the sort of friendship that matures and seasons with the years.
So – heat the pan (this is part of the process of friendship). While it’s heating, beat the eggs in a bowl with a fork – not too much or they’ll get tough. Omelettes are gentle things.
The asparagus tips should be chopped as finely as you can. If they are very fresh – just picked – they’ll crumble in your fingers. Otherwise you’ll need to use a knife – asparagus, like most veg, soon go rubbery. (I distrust any veg that I can bend.)
The pan should now be hot. Throw in the butter and the asparagus tips. The asparagus will seethe and splutter in the hot butter. (If you want a more substantial meal, tip in some chopped spuds.) Stir the whole lot round a couple of times – this all takes about 20 seconds – then pour in the eggs.
Now shake the pan like mad, back and forth, till the eggs start to set and become fluffy. Then leave the pan alone for 10 seconds or so to form a firm bottom.
At this stage you can add a scatter of herbs or sliced capsicum, or even cheese for a really solid meal.
As soon as the omelette is nearly set, fold it in half with a spatula, then in half again, and lift out the quartered omelette – which will start it oozing straight away – and place it on a plate, which you’ll have warmed if you’re organised. (I rarely am, and Bryan eats his lunchtime omelettes on cold plates.)
Don’t overcook it. It’ll turn into leather if you leave it in the pan till it’s set on top. It will keep cooking anyway for about five minutes after you’ve taken it from the pan – but by that time it should have amalgamated with its consumer, who’ll be reaching for the lime and poppy-seed cake or lemon curd tart to have with his cuppa.
October sometime…
Who cares what the date is when the air is thick with scent? Jasmine and the last of the daphne and late jonquils and the honey scent from the final burst of tree-lucerne flowers.
Down to dinner with Noel and Bev Wisbey last night. The Wisbeys are one of the valley’s major peach growers – Noel and Bev at one end of the valley and Rod and Sandra Wisbey at the other, presided over by Ned and Bess Wisbey.
It was Ned and his father who planted the first peaches in the valley during the Depression, up on the hills where they’d be safe from frost.
In those days Ned had just one shirt, which he washed on Fridays so it was fresh for the dance on Friday night (if they held the dance on Saturday night they had to stop for the Sabbath, which was no good because they wanted to dance till dawn). He didn’t have any shoes either. Bess says she first saw him when she was driving down the valley with her brother. ‘That’s Ned Wisbey,’ her brother had said. ‘Don’t you worry about him, he’s never had a pair of shoes in his life.’
He has shoes now – and a million-dollar business – but he doesn’t wear them most of summer, sitting in his shorts and nothing else in a chair outside Noel’s shed or Rod’s, yarning about the valley and the peaches and the flood back in ’42…
We talked about the peach crop. Noel seemed cautiously optimistic – as optimistic as any peach grower can be without tempting hail, flood and six weeks of fog that’ll rot the blossom. No late frosts, enough rain (just – they’re watering already, which means for the last two weeks there’s been no water in what was once the river), sufficient chilling – a whole season so far without hazards – and only another month to go till the first picking, though the main crop will come from December onwards.
It’s a watching time in the valley now. Winter’s work is over – the pruning, which everyone seems to dread from year to year (cold tired fingers and endless trees like skeletons waiting for surgery), fertilising, spraying, planting new trees and fencing new orchards – what hasn’t been done by now has to wait for next year. The pickers are lined up (most come every year, others apply till about the end of August when the books are filled), males in the orchards mostly and women in the shed packing, though a stroppy female will insist on outdoor work and if she does insist, she’ll get it. Most however are happy for the shade, and the (relative) freedom from the peach fluff that gets in every crevice and has the pickers itching till the season’s over.
This is the time you watch the peaches swelling, from the first slight curve as the blossom drops, to the first faint white of fuzz – hard and fuzzy white at first – then bigger, greening through the white and finally yellowing, blushing with the edge of red that customers expect nowadays.
The best varieties (according to me and various old-fashioned peach growers) are still the firm dull-skinned varieties – Golden Queen with its greenish yellow coat or that mottled white-fleshed early peach that looks like a teenager fed on junk food, and you can’t eat it without dribbling juice.
Hardly anyone grows that early peach nowadays. It’s too delicate, bruises with any bump and doesn’t last, and is not a freestone either – the peach flesh still clings to the stone no matter how long you suck at it – but that’s half the joy of a peach, sucking at the stone, trying to get the last of the membranes from between the crevices and down into your gullet.
Gabby is getting thinner – which she shouldn’t be, as there’s plenty of grass. But she doesn’t eat grass like other wombats; just a taste here and a nibble over there, while she waits for the real food – her bottle and oats and wombat nuts and carrots. I stopped giving her a bottle last week, hoping that she’d eat more grass, and I feed her in the morning now, so that she’ll fill up on grass at night…but she doesn’t.
October 26
Picked the first artichokes today – tiny bud-like things not the tennis-ball flowers you get in the shops. You can eat most of the artichoke when it’s small. Even the stalk is delicious.
Artichokes are a peasant crop that for some reason has been elevated to a luxury. I don’t know why. They grow like weeds. (Try a hedge along your front fence – the prickles keep out dogs a
nd rollerblading kids.) Basically that’s what they are – weeds. Artichokes are cultivated thistles.
Nothing kills artichokes: they will survive drought, salt, winds, plagues of locusts, rampaging wallabies, hordes of twelve-year-olds with basketballs. Even if you starve an artichoke plant it will still bear ‘chokes’ – tiny ones, fit for a gnome’s dinner party. We feed ours muck from the chook house and they’re enormous: great globular things, about six to ten on every bush.
Gradually commercial growers are also realising that artichokes grow like weeds: you can sometimes buy great bags incredibly cheaply.
This is good. Artichokes should not be treated as a delicacy. The languid dipping of artichokes, leaf by leaf into sauce is one of the odder French customs, a sort of harking back to the days of the aristocracy when the Comte de Such and Such had time to take his calories individually.
Spring’s a time to guzzle. (Just watch the wombats if you don’t believe me.) Artichokes should be eaten en masse.
Artichokes Araluen, Peasant Style
Find a pair of scissors (in our house this takes some time). Snip all the leaves back to the succulent soft bits at the bottom (see note). You’ll now have a ‘heart’ or base – about a third to a tenth of what you started with. Peel the stalk. It’s good too.
Boil the artichoke heart and peeled stalk until tender (around 5 to 20 minutes, depending on the size of the heart).
Serve with a good vinaigrette, heavy on the French mustard and garlic and chives. I make mine with lime or lemon juice instead of vinegar. Good hot or cold.
Note: The outside leaves needn’t be wasted – simmer 1 cup of leaves for 20 minutes in one of those convenient boxes of chicken stock with a squeeze of lemon or lime juice and half a cup of water. Strain into bowls, and you’ve got Artichoke Consome.
I met my first artichokes in tins, after years of reading about them in English novels – a very exotic thing mostly served by the French or under glass at The Savoy with hollandaise sauce and junior members of the aristocracy à la Dorothy Sayers.
In the 1970s artichokes were fashionable in salads – watery canned lumps that soaked up the salad dressing and dribbled it down your front. (One of the hazards of being large bosomed – if you’re smaller you get the drips on your lap, where the napkin absorbs them – it’s a sign of our lack of gusto in eating that we don’t use bibs.)
The best artichokes I ever ate were at Val Plumwood’s. Val cooks well. This should be a common accomplishment, but it isn’t. Val can take whatever’s in the garden and produce delicious food, just as my elderly neighbour Mrs Hobbins could make superb tea out of an aluminium teapot and tank water and Bushells Green Label – she had the knack, the affinity with tea just as Val has an affinity with food.
Val and I always intend to see each other more often – we only live a few valleys away as the crow flies. But neither of us is a crow, and to get to Val’s from our place we have to drive up to Braidwood, then as far again along another road, then along her track.
We bumped up her track for half an hour (Val does it in fifteen minutes) – thin orange soil through dry thin forest, regrowth of a hundred years of clearing and cattle – then skidded through the mud along the rest of the track, deep, rich, red brown mud with tree ferns wiping at the windscreen and lyrebirds’ tails disappearing up the hill.
Val’s house is built of stone, like ours; and she built her own, like we did. But whereas ours is built of granite from the creek, hers is a crazy quilt of conglomerate sandstone, each lugged up the mountain in a pack on her back and jigsawed into shape, so the result is an almost immaculate hexagon in a clearing of vegie garden and waratahs among the rainforest.
It was artichokes for lunch, she informed us, because she hadn’t been into town to shop for a fortnight – she was trying to finish a paper (on the death of gender I think) and had been living from the garden.
‘You can have an omelette too if you like,’ she offered. ‘But it’ll have to be from goose eggs – a grey goshawk’s frightening the chooks and they’re only giving three or four a day. I eat those for breakfast.’
We declined the omelette (not because we don’t like goose eggs – they make a good if slightly tough and fragrant omelette, but because Val obviously hoped we wouldn’t – perhaps the goose egg was destined for her dinner). But there were plenty of artichokes.
We went down to help her pick them, inspecting our feet for leeches every few minutes (which soon turns into a sort of dance, flicking your heels up and twisting), keeping an eye on the gander who was feeling springlike and longing to dart at our backsides; and the artichokes were rising tall and green among the red mignonette lettuce and patches of yarrow.
We picked perhaps twenty and came inside.
Back in the house the artichokes were snipped so that the tough outer leaves were trimmed back closer to the tender inner core. The new potatoes were roughly washed, and the whole lot thrown into a deep heavy iron pot, black from about twenty years of fires (Val doesn’t have an oven – cooking is on the top of a gas ring, or in the fireplace when it’s cold), with the most generous splash of olive oil I’d ever seen. She put the lid on, turned the gas down low, plunked on the pot, and left the artichokes to sweat.
We waited, discussing wombats, rabbit control (roasting them with a touch of honey and soy sauce is a much more humane method of control than myxo), the outrageously male-dominated world of Australian philosophy, and a new companion in Val’s life – very nice she said, though a little uneducated about feminism, but she’d given him a pile of books last weekend to study and she thought he’d soon be much improved.
The pot steamed gently for about two hours. We were starving. Val finally wandered down to the garden again, pulling up rocket leaves and garlic tops and red chicory leaves and a few very tiny Japanese turnips – we just brushed the dirt off and crunched them in the garden and they were sweeter than apples – and a few asparagus tops and a rabbit-nibbled mignonette lettuce.
These were all washed, tossed into a wooden bowl, drizzled with olive oil and a bit of the juice of one of the limes we’d brought her (we’d brought avocados too but they weren’t ripe yet); then she finally pulled the pot off the stove.
The scent was incredible – not just potato and artichoke and oil but something more. We ate the lot with a drizzle of more lime juice and some of the fresh bread we’d brought from Braidwood – good brown bread with bits of wheat in it baked by the Dutch baker, sodden now with artichoke juice and olive oil and lime, fragrant with potato. (Only fresh spuds taste of anything – with elderly spuds all you get is texture.) And the geese strutted along the terrace hoping we’d throw them some bread.
Ten years ago Val was attacked by a crocodile while canoeing up in Kakadu. She fought it off – one of the few people ever to do so – and escaped, though the croc had chewed part of the way through her upper leg and left other hideous injuries. She dragged her leg for kilometres, then finally crawled, losing blood all the way, till she found a path where someone might find her.
Perhaps it’s that single-mindedness that she brings to food and philosophy too.
October 27
Suddenly Moon Base 1 has turned into the Garden of Eden. You can almost see the roses opening and the fruit swelling. Everything else is swelling too – wombats (Gabby’s stomach is so round it brushes the grass – she’s finally decided to start eating her greens) and the wonga pigeons are undoubtedly the fattest in NSW. Also tubby silvereyes, plump shrike-thrushes, rotund eastern spinebills and pinguid possums.
The possums get fatter every year. The present lot (three of them, Nijinsky, Pavlova and the Young One) occupy the pair of apple trees at the top of the garden. They used to roam all round the place but they’ve got too fat; which means the apple trees look like Belsen victims, all thin and tufty, and the possums sit there burping. They don’t even move if you shine the torch at them now; just absentmindedly rub their stomachs as though massaging down the last few hundred apple buds.
Gabby has lost the hair down one ear. I’m reasonably sure now it isn’t mange after all – there’s no sign of any beasties and we’re giving her the mange dose religiously – and Chocolate’s touch of mange has cleared up totally. I have a horrible feeling that she’s allergic to grass or air or just to life or has just got into the habit of scratching, so scratch she does – which irritates her skin further, so she keeps scratching.
Went up to Braidwood this afternoon. The hills are still green – a green drought, not a brown one, at least till summer’s heat, when the hills turn into skulls, gold grass then brown then even that goes, so they’re almost bleached white and eroding. Their clear shadows stretch along the Tableland, reflecting every knob and rock.
The hills are empty now. A year ago they were dotted with cattle, mostly Herefords, brown and white. We’re finally officially drought-declared – though many farmers smelled drought coming last year. More than 3,000 cattle were sold last Friday at the Braidwood cattle sale – so many that the cattle trucks were backed up along the road. Last Friday’s was only one of many drought sales that are emptying the paddocks and lives and bank accounts.