The Magnificent Michael Mobbs

Michael is an Australian living legend in sustainability who gets out there and does things about the issues he uncovers about food production in Australia developing options for personal actions that are not hard. This is one of his characteristically inspiring talks about what he has done, a terrific willingness to talk about his childhood and early adult life, reflections of the role of governments in sustainability and waste, touches on food security and heaps of other discursions (I like that better than digressions which always carries that sense of irrelevance or wastefulness whereas Michael's wanderings are anything but).

I've been to his house on several occasions, one of over 19,000 internationally who have.Thankfully I went as a friend and not an eco-tourist, not that there is anything necessarily wrong about that). He is very clear about the limits of what a person can do, but also suggests how what you do when you start talking to neighbours, passers-by and your community.

It was he who inspired me to get the Council not to plant turf on the footpath outside our house when they lifted the concrete, but rather to let us plant flowering and food plants, the latter I admit limited to parsley that now self seeds majestically for salads and tabbouleh, a lemon balm that self seeded after escaping over my backyard fence where its original is, a lemon tree that hopefully will give me its first fruit this year, a passionfruit that for the past two years has just given and given and given, an incipient avocado tree, chickweed and dandelions (I still can't quite come at eating the milk-thistles) which I love adding to salads or vegetable pies, marigolds from which I can pick the flowers, marjoram that's having a nice time spreading.

Michael talks a lot about water wastage and how to cut down on it. I treasure the moat that our architect Misho built for us as part of our renos that has only ever been dry once in its 8 or more years history, being filled by the smallest shower onto the vast expanse of corrugated tin roof on the kitchen/dining space, which also now sports a significant bank of solar panels  - which Misho rightly says are not pretty, but do look somewhat interestingly scientifico-architectural  in our case as they have to be raised and angled and there are so many of them. The moat is the prime source of watering for the whole of the back garden. The plants on the footpath and in the front garden, which include olive, mango, guava tree and something that I had always thought was a NZ plant but someone the other day reckoned was a feijoa and to tell the truth the fruit look like it but I have not put mouth to them as yet - may well do this season while holding the mobile set to 000).


http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/classic/midday/201211/miv-2012-11-05.mp3

A Passion for Pork

My love affair with pork began with my first Sri Lankan pork curry - the unctuousness of the pork fat, the sweetness of the meat, the gelatinous skin, the sharpness of  vinegar, or even better that of goroka (aka gamboge), combined with a mix of roasted ground cumin, fennel seed, coriander, dried red chillies, fresh curry leaves, chopped ginger and garlic, shredded (sera) lemon grass, a fold of rampa (pandanus) a stick of cinnamon, all cooked up in coconut milk.

It's a classic Burgher dish that rarely appears on the menus of Sri Lankan restaurants in Australia, or if it does it is so dumbed down that it could be any meat swimming  in a brown gravy. Can't risk having putting in goroka, looking for all the world like black slugs sitting among the meat and tasting like crap should you chew it. It's actually the dried segments of the fruit Garcinia gummi-gutta and you are not supposed to eat them . They are there to give their characteristic highly sour flavour that cuts through the sweetness of the pork brilliantly. Can't have chunks of fatty pork for fear of scaring the health conscious. Ditto coconut milk which gets such a bad rap these days. And when I ate it in Sri Lanka you would occasionally still find the stub of a hair sticking blackly out of the skin.  Prepared as it should be it is an unashamedly jungly dish.

Pickled pork was another early favourite. My dad made it a couple of times, and I have also. It's based on the meat from the head of a pig boiled and then bottled up with mustard seed, dry red chillies, ginger, garlic, green chillies, turmeric, salt and vinegar. It's ready 24 hours after bottling. You can then eat it straight out of the bottle say as a side dish with other curries, or you can fry it up with a little of its pickling liquid in some ghee or vegetable oil and again have it as a side dish. Makes a great sandwich, too.

Sticking with the Burgher ways with pork, you can also make it as a smoore, a whole piece slow pot roasted  in coconut milk and roasted spices sharpened in this case with lime pickle, the piece taken out and browned in ghee or oil, and served sliced soused with the gravy.

I don't recall having pork roast in Sri Lanka. We didn't have an oven and any roasting or baking  had to be done at my uncles house across the road, and I don't recall eating it when I went visiting at all. So it must have been early days of mum dipping into the Women's Weekly that put the first leg of pork with crackling onto the table. Trotters I think I had curried in Sri Lanka, and then met again as cold vinegared collagen full Chinese yum cha favourites. It was courtesy of a bowl of congee lunching in Chinatown that I first delighted in rousong aka pork floss, dried shredded pork meat sprinkled on top of said congee. And of course I could happily spend my life eating nothing but char siu/siew, a bowl of rice, and some wilted Chinese greens, the marinade so rich in the flavours of regional.national combinations of soy, Chinese wines, maltose, five spice, hoi sin and, from the range of recipes you can Google, pretty much anything that will serve to give that characteristic sweet roasted stickiness.

This post was stimulated by three encounters during this week with pork in three forms. The first was frankly disappointing. It was touted as pork with lentils and greens and certainly those elements were there, but the pork was absurdly tough, the skin difficult to cut let alone chew, the lentils in too much broth. All of this at a dinner during Crave Sydney International Food Festival.

The second was an altogether more satisfying experience, an excellent pork, pickled cabbage and apple sauce roll from Runcible Spoon, a small cafe in Camperdown. The pork was if not pulled certainly pullable ('pulled' pork being everywhere in Sydney at the moment, taking over from belly pork of a few months ago), the cabbage firm and lightly vinegary in generous ribbons the apple sauce not overly sweet, and the roll airy and just toasted. Here is a picture of the roll. (I fear I shall have to go correct the logo of the cafe however as per this delightful discussions of what exactly is a runcible spoon).

My third encounter was today, courtesy of a birthday lunch for son Raj, which we had at the Concordia Club, Tempe, host to the Oktoberfest (happily over by the time of our lunch) and renowned for its pork knuckle which was massive, no other word for it, perfectly tender, with a lightly crisp crackling with a nice layer of fat under it still soft,  and simply served with mashed potato, a green bean salad, and sauerkraut. Again here is the meal.

Love the serving touch of the knife stuck in the knuckle. It was the serrated edge knife that was ideal for parting the flesh. The beer was a schooner of Spaten. Now, I don't usually drink beer but I certainly think it was the perfect go with here, cutting the grease and that yeastiness again working against the sweetness of the pork. The setting added much to the enjoyment of this meal. The building is a renovated bowling club (the lawns are still but croquet is now the game of choice) and we sat in the vast carpeted dining hall, all long tables fully occupied with middle and eastern European groups chowing down on the knuckle and/or schnitzel. There was a band playing hits from no later than the 60's, some generic Latin American (sambas, bossa novas) and the occasional polka, but strictly intended and enjoyed as a dance band for a floorful of couples of a certain age having a fabulous time waltzing (yes they played a Strauss or two), quick-stepping, jiving, cha-cha-ing and doing those ball room dance steps with supreme nonchalance. There was a cake counter with what looked like the entire repertoire of German/Austrian cakes, and in a side room a mini supermarket of all things middle European.

Greek Milk Bars in Australia

A lovely short piece about the restoration of the Roxy Theatre and Cafe in Bingara, Northern NSW. There's a story waiting to be written about the Greek cafes and their place in Australia culinary history, as there is about the Chinese restaurants, two institutions that provided alternatives to the pub as a social space in country towns in Australia.

http://www.smh.com.au/travel/big-screen-big-dreams-for-a-night-at-the-roxy-20121102-28pga.html

Jimmy and the Giant Supermarket

Just had a look at the first ep of Jimmy and the Giant Supermarket – Jimmy Doherty, a free range pig farmer in UK trying to develop ‘high welfare’ alternatives for three of the biggest selling meat products of Tesco’s.

Terrific for exploring the decision making process of Tesco’s about getting a product onto the market and how hard it is to bring a high welfare product within the affordability Tesco’s wants to meet (oops!) for its market.

But for me its even more interesting for where the program goes in identifying a practice that wastes meat and how Doherty then passionately works to address the waste and create a 'high welfare' alternative practice. It's not giving too much away to say it's about the Tesco shoppers' aversion to eating veal because of concerns for what they understand as the way calves are raised for veal  and what happens to male jersey calves that are surplus to dairy farmers' needs. 

I almost want to go on line and see whether what he comes up with worked or not, but I will buy into the suspense narrative and hope for a big pay-off.

Warning - not for the faint hearted; there is a scene around 20 minutes into the ep that is confronting.

Interested? Check out  http://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/video/2294845015/Jimmy-And-The-Giant-Supermarket-Meatballs?utm_source=Latest

Agribots

How could I not share this - the bringing together of two of my great loves, food and sci-fi. It's all in an article titled Down on the robofarm, by James Mitchell Crowe in New Scientist, No 2888, 27 October 2012. The article is a short review of developments in agribots, farm machinery with robotics that are already  doing some extraordinary things - farm machines that talk to each other, like a John Deese system that lets one farm machine, like a harvester, call another to help with the next stage of the process, like unloading the grain. Then there's the German firm Frendt that has developed a system of paired tractors where one is manually driven and the other goes along next to it doing the same things that the first one is doing.

They are looking at developing machines that can track along a crop row, identify a single weed and hit it with a micro-dot of pesticide or ones that can do regular checks on each plant and give it just the right dose of fertiliser to spurt its growth. The long term projection is developing farms designed specifically for agribot farming - smaller fields, crops planted in grids instead of rows.

But what about the social costs - the labourers thrown of the land, the growth of agribusinesses who will be the only ones that can afford to own and operate the agribots! Aren't I one of those who goes gooey eyed at organic, small holding, ma and pa produced crops!

Guilty as charged. But these are the futures I've read about all my life and I have a childlike glee in hearing they are being realised.

Mango Pickle

Vinayak in King Street Newtown is my local South Asian spice shop. There's always a selection of home made pickles, upma, dhokla, home grown chillies, karela (karawilla in Sri Lanka), okra (commonly called ladies fingers in Sri Lanka) brinjal (eggplant), the occasional gourd. The owner is always pressing product onto me as he knows I write about food and suppliers and I am not one to refuse.

The other day he had just got in some fresh mango pickle which is wife said people from all over Sydney had been coming in to get (a tad exaggerated I thought given it was only supposed to have come in that morning and it was barely mid-day, even given the speed of the South Indian mobile phone tree). It looked fantastic as you can see below, the dark green of the skin, the sunny yellow of the flesh, the orange of the exuberance of oil and the dark brown of the spicing.

Happily the taste lived up to it also. Fiery, oily (what, you don't like oil - then pass on South Asian pickles, we like them greasy to get the rice slippery for its ride down the gullet), the roasted spices robust and the salt excessive. It had the strength to stand up to being dolloped onto a nice bit of sourdough and savoured for lunch (okay, I lied about the savouring part which suggests I took it slow - no way, Jose! The second something this good hits my palate I time travel back to my oral phase (you know your Freud, right, we're talking babydom here) and the imperative to get it all in now in case there never ever is anymore kicks in bigtime).

Mango pickle in its many forms has been a constant craving for me since said babydom days. The accharu woman outside the school grounds was the favourite going home snack stop, her chatty of fresh sliced mango marinating away vinegar, salt, chili, lime, diced red onions and sugar, spoonfuls of it ladled then into a newspaper packet, to be pecked at by fingers on the bus trip home. The Vinayak version was more the keeping kind of pickle hence the oil and the more complex spicing. It's easy to make and keeps for a good while, that is unless you have this fixation on it like I do. The recipe below is adapted from a recipe of mine for green mango temperado pickle.


MANGO  PICKLE

Ingredients:
1.5 kg just ripe mangoes100 gms black mustard seed20 dry red chillies100 gms coriander seed25 gms fennel seed50 gms cumin2 tbsp turmeric2 tbsp cinnamonvinegar
salt
good quality vegetable oil
sesame oil


Method:Cut the mangoes into fingers as per the picture below.

Roast the dry spices and the dry chili together till they are aromatic and a deep brown colour. Grind them fine.

Mix the mangoes and the ground spice mix together.

Slosh in a little vinegar, just enough to wet the pickling mix.

Add a little salt, taste, and if you want to add a little more until it is salty enough to heighten the mango flavour but not drown it entirely.

Now add a teaspoon or two of sesame oil and mix it all again.

Finally add the vegetable oil a little at a time mixing as you do till the mangoes are thoroughly oily and slippery.

Concerning Citrus

Growing up in Sri Lanka I didn't have much truck with citrus fruit other than limes - lime pickle an invariable part of a Sri Lankan's upbringing, lime juice squeezed onto papaw, lime sodas, lime as an essential component of sambols (pol sambol and katta sambol being favourites), lime sharpening prawn curries, and candied lime (and orange) peel in the Sri Lankan Christmas cake. With the variety of tropical fruit in our garden, the neighbours' gardens and the streets I lived and played in, oranges and mandarins didn't measure up, not even as something exotic.

When we came to Australia in the 1960's that fruit profile changed. My first few months were a summer spent on an orchard in Arcadia at that time on the outskirts of Sydney (how apposite that name was I didn't realise until encountering it in books of Greek myths and legends). There was a plenitude of apples and oranges and my brothers and I were allowed to pick what we liked from the home paddock and provident overhangs thereinto. But even here it was to under-ripe apples I was draw more, continuing my craving for the sourer end of the fruit spectrum. Orange juice would appear unsought and under appreciated at the breakfast table and a mandarin or two would be tucked into my lunch box. Sunnyboys, on the other hand, the pyramidal packaged frozen orange tuck shop treats, were irresistible, and orange fizzy drinks, but then neither of these had any but a passing acquaintance with orange juice.

So it continued into my adult years. I don't recall the last time I actually bought oranges. I don't drink orange juice unless someone else has bought it and it happens to be staring at me when I open the fridge door. I buy blood oranges in season because one should more than because I want them. Lemons and limes on the other hand have always had their place in my cooking.

But the citrus cohort wasn't finished tyring to lure me in. When I moved into my present house there already were a mandarin and a lime tree, neither of which had been doing much for want of any attention. I was excited by the prospect of harvesting my own limes, and taken with the idea of re-invigorating the mandarin, not being one to have a fruit tree in the yard and get no benefit from it (though I have yet to encourage a very old established mango in the front to do anything). I took to caring for them as per information available on line, for example that from Gardening Australia which I always find helpful at just my level of need-to-know, and they have rewarded me for several seasons now, each time with just that much more, larger and juicier fruit.

For my 50th birthday I asked those gift-giving inclined to give me fruit trees and thereby acquired a kumquat and a lemonade tree. These too have taken a liking to the garden and me and produce in abundance in season. Being no resigned to having citrus in my live,when we came to plant out our nature strip rather than succumb to the Council's plan to replace the cracked concrete of the street's footpath with buffalo grass, I planted two lemon trees which are yet in their infancy and have tentatively flowered but gone no further.

All of this of course means that suddenly I have more citrus than I have ever wanted or can consume while they are in season. This has set me on the path of finding ways to conserve what I don't consume, and that extends to the peels.

The first step was simple. I recalled my father feeding the skins of lemons he had juiced to the family lime pickle jar, which by this stage was more a lemon pickle as a consequence. Having inherited said jar is seemed only sensible to keep up the practice. When there was no room left in the heirloom I struck out on my own.

Simple Lime Pickle Base
Take some fresh limes and quarter them. Rub salt into them and leave them to dry out in the sun until the skin goes a yellow to dark tan. The salt draws the moisture out of the limes and wrinkles them up. Bottle these up with enough vinegar  to cover them, you can add some fresh or dried red chillies too. Leave for a couple of months, till the limes get soft again and have absorbed some of the vinegar. Now they are ready to use.

This is also a great way to recycle lemon and lime peels post squeezing. Save them up in a bag or other container in the freezer until you have a heap of them and then proceed as above.

The kumquat tree was the next to demand attention. I go two ways on these. My sister-in-law introduced me to eating them whole raw, skin and all. But I still  get way more than I could snack on. an snack on so I've turned to pickling them. Once ready I serve them as a relish with roasted and barbecued meats, and indulge myself with a bowl of vanilla ice cream topped with a generous spoonful of the pickled fruit.

Kumquat Pickle
Ingredients675 g kumquats
450 g preserving sugar 175 ml white wine vinegar 2 x cinnamon sticks, each about 5cm long.6 whole cloves 
 

MethodPut the cumquats in a saucepan over a low heat. Cover with water, add the sugar and simmer for 20 minutes.

Remove the cumquats and divide them equally between sterile preserving jars.

Add the white wine vinegar, cinnamon sticks and cloves to the sugar syrup, turn the heat up to high and boil for 20 minutes. Skim off any scum that appears on the surface.

Strain the syrup into the preserving jars (use a funnel if you have one). Screw the lids on tightly. Store the pickle for one month before eating.

The huge globes of the lemonade tree presented one obvious solution - lemonade, or at least lemon cordial that could be mixed with either still or sparkling water. This recipe from Matthew Evans has never failed in preparation or enjoyment.

Lemon Syrup
Ingredients

2 lemons well-scrubbed
350gs caster sugar
2 cups boiling water
25g tartaric acid

Method
Finely grate the lemon rind. Juice the lemons, keeping the squeezed halves.

Put the rind, the juice, the squeezed halves and the caster sugar into a bowl.Pour over the boiling water and stir well to dissolve the sugar. Leave it to cool overnight, in the fridge if it's a warm night.

The next day, take out the squeezed lemon halves, stir in the tartaric acid and pour into sterilized bottles.

Keep stored in the fridge till you want to use it. Shake it well before mixing with still or sparkling water.


Finally, this year, even the lemonade tree has produced more than I can make syrup from. In desperation I turned my thoughts to other big citrus fruits and their possibilities. This led me back to candying citrus, and I am looking forward this year to using my own candied peel in my Christmas Cake - that is if it avoids being tossed into cookies and muffins my niece Casey bakes on a regular basis.

 Candied Peel



Ingredients

450g peels  all pulp removed

Pinch of salt

700g sugar

1.5lt (6 cups) water

Method

Wash the peels.  Put them in a pot with plenty of water and a pinch of salt. Bring to the boil and simmer till the peels are translucent (about 1 hours should do it). Drain and rinse them.

Heat the sugar and the 1.5 litres of water till it boils, put in the peels, turn the heat to a simmer and let cook for 20 minutes. Turn the heat off and let the peel stand in the sugar syrup.

Next day, bring the peels and sugar syrup to the boil and again simmer for 20 minutes. Repeat this on four more days.

On the next day, remove the peels from the syrup and drain them on a wire rack for 8 hours. Store them in a jar or takeaway food container in the fridge and use as you like. 

You can use the syrup as a dressing on a fresh fruit salad or pour it over ice cream or jelly.