Giles grows strawberries and garlic (both are superb) and Victoria pots and draws and makes linocuts and woodcuts.
Theirs is the sort of garden that will look magnificent in 200 years’ time, when the trees are lichened and twisted and shelter tiny courtyards, and even now it is something of an oasis.
I have made Jembaicumbene sound ugly. It isn’t; just wide and wind-filled. It has a touch of Lombardy about it, green stretching to far hills and stands of poplars above the stream and watermeadows full of brilliant enamelled buttercups. It is very beautiful, especially in the frost, when the spider webs are frozen between the barbed wire and even the great oak by the bridge has turned white, and when the mist hangs over it in soft drifts so the world is white and green and wet.
But I am glad to live in the valley.
We ate rooster, youthful and still tender, cooked in red wine. Giles is the only person I know who can make coq au vin that isn’t stringy; maybe you have to be French or have a wood stove for long slow cooking or a very old meat roaster. And we ate fresh chapattis because they’d forgotten to put the bread in the oven. Giles made flat cakes of the risen dough and laid them for a few seconds each side on the top plate of the wood stove, then Victoria held them just above the coals in the fire box, so they puffed up and were crisp.
They were excellent, especially with the rich wine gravy and the greens from the garden (except that only a few of the leaves were green, brown too, and red, and cress and roasted sunflower seeds to scatter on top so they wouldn’t get sodden in the dressing) and the first of the potatoes – the crop is late at Jembaicumbene – two or three sorts so you could scavenge in the bowl for the ones you liked best. And a late plum pudding with raspberries and cream for us and strawberry ice cream (homemade, home grown) for the kids, who eat plum pudding under protest once a year and felt they’d done their annual duty already.
The raspberries were fat and firm – you need a fresh, cold climate raspberry to appreciate its texture – ours are Wettex-like, just a hint of what a raspberry can be and dotted with grass seeds. Giles had picked them in the half light as we arrived. (They gave us raspberry jam to take home too; set firm with its own pectin, and unbelievably red and seedy.) Usually Jembaicumbene raspberries are withered by the wind; but this year they’re in abundance (some kindly freak of the Weather God who lives in the mist on the mountains) and they’re making the best of it.
Somewhere in all the eating the conversation turned to peaches. Why were the peaches in France (they spent the winter there this year, staying with Giles’s family) universally good? Even the supermarket peaches in France were fragrant. Why were the ones in the shops here so lousy – tasteless and often textureless?
I think I have the answer: it’s the early peaches that are lousy, sold for early lucrative gain in November, when peaches haven’t much flavour – they haven’t had enough sun – unless they’re eaten pretty close to where they’re picked, before the first faint blush of scent and taste has faded. Your average peach buyer buys early peaches, is disappointed and doesn’t buy any more till next year and the whole pattern is repeated.
Of course there are also the peach buyers who demand that every peach has a red skin, which is why it’s almost impossible to buy superb old-fashioned peaches like Golden Queen any more – they’re dull greenish yellow skinned and furry, not smooth and red blushed white at all. Consumers get what they deserve.
But there are magnificent peaches around, except in wet years when everything – peaches most of all – tastes of rain. This isn’t one of them.
January 6
The trees are green shadows in a brown land; the grass so dry it sounds like cornflakes when you tread on it, thin fragile brown stuff that literally turns to dust.
The creek stopped flowing over the crossing yesterday; then last night it began again, a fine trickle like a cold green thread; and this morning was gone. It’ll probably keep doing that for weeks till it stops altogether.
You start ascribing feelings to nature in times like this – the sky really is pitiless and today’s wind relentless, tearing, gusting, throwing up leaves as though waiting for a pyromaniac to throw down a match. The avocados look like hysterics throwing themselves around the flat.
There’s a big fire over past Captains Flat, but the smoke hasn’t reached here yet, and there are fires all along the New South Wales coast. No respite in sight, just more blue sky and wind.
The peach trees are drooping along the road; but the fruit is good. The whole valley smells of sweetness, richer than honey, deeper than blossom.
Picked our first egg tomato today (in gumboots, as the snake still roams the vegie garden; red-bellied black snakes adore the scent of tomato leaves – it masks their own).
A real egg tomato. Not the little cherry tomatoes we’ve had for months this time – one sharp mouthful and they’re gone, too much skin to do much with – really just a touch of brightness after too long with winter green salads.
This one was wonderful, incredibly deep red, perfect except for the bottom where an eelworm was nestling so I cut that bit off and we ate the rest. The eelworm had good taste; the tomato was superb. Tomatoes, like other fruit, taste best in droughts.
I picked a few not so ripe (and not eelworm infested) to cook for dinner – half a dozen chopped roughly (home grown never have such thick skins as bought ones) and threw them in the cast-iron pan (I love my cast-iron pan; it’ll be one of the things I’ll try to rescue the day the fire comes across the ridges) with lots of olive oil and some roughly chopped nearly red capsicum, and seethed them for a few minutes with some very fresh garlic, then threw on lots of basil – torn, not chopped – ten seconds more and took it off the heat to add the pepper (if you cook pepper it gets bitter). We ate it with roast chook and creamed potatoes mashed with chopped garlic chives.
The fresh garlic came from Giles. Fresh garlic is different from older garlic – crisper, sweeter, less sulphurous, and dissolves when it’s sautéed. I can throw a dozen cloves into the pan with the butter and the chook, and they’ll turn to mush and gravy. Later in the season when the garlic has toughened and dried out I’ll either have to fish them out when I strain the gravy juices, or ladle them onto my plate – I love roast garlic (dark brown and sweet like raisins), even if it’s slightly tough.
I bought twelve garlands of garlic from Giles yesterday – about twelve kilos. With luck it’ll last all the year, supplemented by what I remember to pull up of ours, which won’t be much – I never get around to it till the whole lot withers from the ground and disappears till next year, to come up in a host of tiny garlic stems.
We do eat the stems. Garlic stems are delicious, much better than leeks if you pick them when they are fattest but before they begin to go to seed; just bake them with a drizzle of olive oil and maybe a few dried tomatoes or a scatter of parsley and a very little lime or lemon juice.
Even when they do go to seed, the stems are still good – peel them and slice them thinly – a cross between garlic and a waterchestnut. You can pickle the flowers if you’ve got spiced vinegar on hand and eat them where you would normally eat capers – they’re better than capers – but once I discovered the recipe and we wolfed down the first three bottles I didn’t bother with it again. Which probably means it’s not one of life’s great culinary discoveries.
January 7
The air is so dry you can feel your skin withering.
There are fires all over New South Wales, and the sky is totally cloudless, the sort of featureless blue that almost invites smoke to smother it.
Every summer we wait for the fires here, wondering ‘Will this be the year…?’
Twice in the past ten years I’ve gathered up possessions in case we have to evacuate – documents and photographs and basic clothes and E’s old toy wombat and my favourite of Grandma’s paintings.
It’s terrifying but also strangely cleansing to work out which of your accumulations you really do love and which are just a matter of
money and replacing.
Bryan was up at the Fire Control Centre all of yesterday and part of last night. They had fed him a steak sandwich from the Burger Barn; he looked deprived when he came home and glanced wistfully at the leftovers: a few pieces of fresh corn still in a bowl with the new potatoes, some chicken with mango and a hunk of pavlova.
I’d made pavlova because E complained he’d never eaten one (not surprising – Bryan doesn’t like them, which was why I made one last night). I used the egg whites that have been accumulating from my ice cream binge and put chopped nectarines and banana and banana passionfruit on top – yellower fleshed and drier than normal passionfruit, but almost as sweet in summer, and even better on pavlova which is too sweet anyway.
Tiny Onions in Mango Chutney
A variation on sweet and sour onions.
Pick your onions young and sweet; peel them; drip some olive oil in a pan and cook the onions slowly and carefully for 10 minutes, till they are almost transparent, then add a good dollop of mango chutney, keep cooking slowly and stirring often till thick and sticky. Serve hot.
Good with grilled chicken or meat on skewers.
January 8
The Lorings are in the shed down at Wisbey’s.
Loring is an enormous peach with a yellow skin and yellow flesh – a peaches in champagne peach. You can make a meal of a Loring. The trees give huge crops. The main problem with marketing Loring, says Noel Wisbey, is that it isn’t red. The secret is to refrigerate them overnight. This turns the skins an even yellow, wiping out the greenish tinge, without harming taste or texture.
People buy apples by name and season – early Gravensteins, mid-season Jonnies, late Granny Smiths. But, to most people, a peach is a peach.
Not to the Wisbeys – or anyone who lives in Araluen. Everyone has their favourite peach. This is the land of the peach connoisseur. White fleshed or yellow, clingstone or free, firm or juicy, blush red or sallow – each peach has its season and its flavour.
Each variety holds for about ten days – a time of solid picking, sorting and packing before the fruit spoils.
I miss the old peach varieties. I remember one old-fashioned aniseed-flavoured sort that I haven’t seen for years; sliced up with peeled grapes and cream, it scented the bowl. Others whose skin and flesh stays green even when sweet and ripe and the bees are sipping at the juice from a bird peck.
The flavour of peaches declines with storage. You can only expect a peach to keep its full fragrance in your fridge for about five days – and that’s if you grew it yourself. No supermarket peach can ever taste really good – it’s just the memory of lusciousness, a peach for those who’ve never guzzled a peach from a tree.
January 9
WIRES rang last night; they have another wombat needing to go bush.
I hesitated. The Gabby disaster has made me doubt my ability to care for a young wombat, despite the ones who’ve gone bush successfully from here before. (A young roo I was caring for died when I was pregnant with E – its injured foot developed gangrene – and for months I anguished over my ability to care for a child.)
I explained my fears – or some of them – to WIRES. But they were still happy for me to take her – she apparently failed to go bush in another refuge, and had to be brought back to the city; and if she fails here they’ll take her back again.
So I agreed, and drove through the smoke to pick her up. (The fires are under control…till the next lot break out. I have rarely known the sort of fury I feel when I think of those that light them. For the first time I understand public hangings and displays of hate.)
She’s dark brown, round and scared – the scaredest wombat I’ve ever met; starting at every noise and showing the whites of her eyes and needing to be cuddled all the way home, her nose in E’s armpit.
I showed her the hole with some trepidation, ready to bundle her back into the car if she refused to go in. She sniffed, considered, advanced cautiously inside – then came out ten minutes later, dusty and for once relaxed, with just the hint of a wombat grin, as though to say: ‘Dirt! Ah, dirt!’
She gulped down her bottle, fell asleep on my lap, woke up twenty minutes later, sniffed and trotted back to the hole. Five minutes later I heard digging.
Her name is Phoebe; but she doesn’t really look like a Phoebe, and in fact hasn’t had the name long. For some reason her other carers found it hard to give her a name too.
The world is still grey. I woke up gasping in the night; the air was almost too thick to breathe. I went out to the balcony, hoping the air would at least be moving there and there was Phoebe munching on the lawn, Chocolate a darker shadow under the persimmon tree.
January 10
Bryan calls Phoebe Frisbee, because she keeps coming back; advances cautiously round the rose bush, then darts back in terror if the rooster calls. She’s a good eater though; will finish a bottle in two minutes flat, devote some time to wombat nuts and carrots, then go at the grass – and she eats grass like it is a religion, something you dedicate yourself to – and then she goes to bed.
January 11
Bryan gave me an ice cream machine for Christmas (I craved ice cream in the 1978–82 drought too, savouring something cool and moist at least somewhere in the world – I’d have holidayed at the Pole if I could have).
I thought of making peach ice cream, remembering the first lot of ice cream I ever made in ‘79, with the gum leaves drooping and the air filled with hot eucalyptus oil – you could smell that ice cream from one end of the shed to the other, and we all sat on the hot hill in the twilight and churned and churned – but apart from E we’re sick of peaches already (he ate twelve yesterday; I counted the peach stones by the video). So I made plain vanilla instead, and we ate it with fresh peaches (E) or sliced bananas (Bryan) and leftover Christmas pudding (me). But I probably will make peach ice cream again, with bottled peaches, once the peaches are off the trees and the peach fuzz out of the air and I start to crave their sweetness again.
Peach Ice Cream
Chill 6 peaches in the fridge till very cold. Peel them; slice them; roll in lemon juice to stop them going brown. Make a custard with:
2 cups cream
2 cups milk
6 egg yolks
6 dessertspoons caster sugar
1/2 cup chopped macadamias if you have them
Heat the custard mixture gently in a double boiler till it thickens. Add nuts. Place in the fridge till cool.
Mix the sliced peaches into the custard. Place in an ice cream machine and churn till hard; or put ice and salt in a bowl and put the mixture in a smaller bowl and whip till thick (takes about 30 minutes, and is incredibly smooth and good).
Keep in the freezer, naturally, but not too long as the subtlety disappears and the texture flattens a bit too. Fresh ice cream is by far the best.
January 12
Great thuds and reverberations down at the chook house – Lacy goanna’s tail lashing on the roof. She can’t get in to steal the eggs because we’ve closed the door. Instead the chooks fly in through a special chook window – with stripy plastic curtains to dissuade the bowerbirds from flying in as well to eat the wheat. (We found the curtains at the dump.) But Lacy goanna has never learnt to fly. So she sits on the roof swishing her tail instead and hissing at the chickens, who ignore her. Maybe goannas dream of growing wings and turning into dragons and investigating nests on high-up ledges…
Lacy goanna gets as drunk as the cockatoos some summers, but only if we neglect the trees and let the peaches rot on the ground. (If she had wings she could fly down to the dump.)
Goannas don’t get obstreperous on fermented peaches. They just laze along the branches, burping. Apart from eggs and rotten peaches, goannas love decaying meat. They’re the scavengers of the bush…and their burps smell like it.
January 13
Took E up to town to have his foot looked at – he cut it on an oyster down the coast, but it’s healing cleanly. Phoebe Frisbee Pudge was waiting to
play when we got home.
Pudge is E’s name for her, and it suits her because she is. She eats with dedication, like a vacuum-cleaner absorbing grass across the lawn. She’s more contented now. It’s been days since she showed the whites of her eyes.
We played The Wombat Game, which involves jumping out at the wombat from behind a bush; and then the wombat runs off and hides and jumps out at you…The game must be programmed somewhere into the wombat mentality, as all wombats play it – though come to think of it, Gabby didn’t.
Phoebe Frisbee Pudge loves The Game, especially when we wrestle her when she’s brought us to the ground, snapping and grinning and baring her teeth, which are long and curved and could be dangerous if she ever really gripped with them, but she doesn’t. Just snaps and shakes and lets us go. (Ricki The Wrestler used to draw blood sometimes, grinning away and not realising that the shouts were agony not glee.)
January 14
I love the richness, the sheer sun and dirtiness of summer garden smells – pungent tomato branches shooting out their bitterness as you water them; the hot sweet scent of mint, the cooler smells of carrots and beetroot and silverbeet.
You get the strongest garden scents in summer; and the most aromatic at night – even better when you’ve been hosing, as though the water brings the scents back down to earth. (I wonder if there are pockets of garden smells under the clouds; if eagles get a sudden whiff of cauliflower rotting from too much rain, or an echo of parsnips drifting with the wind.)
The curry bush smells strongest of all the garden plants. It hangs over a band of rocks up above the bathroom – many times I’ve dashed from the loo to the kitchen to whip up a vindaloo. Of all fragrances, curry is perhaps the most irresistible. I mean that literally; once you’ve smelled it you’ve got to taste.
Year in the Valley Page 12
