Perfect picnic food

Flix in the Stix is coming to Tamworth this week and it sounds to me like a great excuse for a picnic. Unfurl your tartan rug and pack your basket with foods that you can share and graze on – cold meats and olives, finger sandwiches and something sweet to finish.

For more picnic food ideas, including some recommendations from Tamworth's Phillippe Kanyaro, of Le Pruneau, and Leisel Mcilrick, of Ruby's Cafe and Gift Store, check out my article over at Tamworth Country Life.

What's your favourit picnic food?

Party Food

Party food, finger food, nibbles - call it what you like, catering for drinks can often be more labour intensive than cooking a three course meal for eight. So when a friend asked me to bring a plate to his wife's surprise 30th birthday party, I was happy to help out.

There are many bakers of mini-quiche in this town, all of them far more accomplished than me, so I had to come up with another idea. Being the recipe junkie I am, I trawled through my clippings and magazines, developed a shortlist and settled on pork larb.

Larb is a minced meat salad, usually served at room temperature. A quick web search suggests it's a traditional dish of Laos, but it's also a feature of Thai cuisine, in both Thailand and here at home. Indeed, much of the "Thai" food we eat in Australia is often a blend of broader South-East Asian Cuisine.

I'm really not sure how traditional my dish was, but it certainly had typical ingredients: chilli, lemongrass, fish sauce, lime juice, mint and coriander. I found the recipe in a back issue of delicious magazine and the same recipe has been published online by delicious uk.

Drinks were on a Friday night, and this was a fantastic post-work party dish, as I could cook the pork the night before and assemble pre-party. The Australian version of the recipe recommends baby cos leaves. I used both cos and iceberg and I found the iceberg more suitable, with less wastage.

I'd recommend using free range pork mince for the best flavour and don't skip the toasted rice - it's a fantastic looking garnish, is easy to do and surprisingly delicious. Plus it's a key component of traditional larb dishes.

Happy nibbling.

The gardening caper

I am not a very good gardener. Or maybe gardening is harder than I expected it to be. Probably both.

Sixteen months ago, when we moved from inner-city Melbourne to Tamworth, in the north-west of NSW, I expected to find myself in veggie growing heaven. We would have a no-dig garden and a worm farm, we would grow vast quantities of vegetables to share and we would don Etsy-esque aprons and start pickling when it all got too much.

We hit our first hurdle when it came to the no-dig bed. You see, the area we had set aside was 2.5 x 2.5 metres. That’s a lot of pea straw, newspapers, lucerne, well rotted manure, hydrocell and certified-organic compost – all the ingredients we would need according to Stephanie Alexander’s Kitchen Garden Companion.

We overcame this and incurred much less expense thanks to a generous donation from Sam’s uncle, who is a lucerne farmer, and a trailer-load of organic 3-in-1 from a local landscape supplier. We set out our railway sleepers, laid newspaper on the ground, covered it with lucerne, topped up with organic 3-in-1 from the Tamworth Landscape Supplies and then mulched with more lucerne. And just to be straight with you, “organic” does not refer to a lack of chemicals; rather, it refers to organic material consisting of a whole lot of manure. It smelt questionable and the plants loved it. So did the dog.

Tamworth gets very hot. By the time the garden bed was set it was a little late to be planting from seed, so we bought some seedlings and watched them grow. Summer was a huge success. We lived off beans, pickled cucumbers and made pesto from one metre high basil. We experienced no pests and generally felt very proud of ourselves. The few seeds we did try to raise - beetroot, capsicum, chilli - didn’t amount to much, but we weren’t perturbed. After all, we were still learning.

Then I got a little enthusiastic with seeds. I shopped at diggers. I bought heirloom leek and beetroot; chives, pak choy and watercress; snow peas and broad beans. I planted them direct or in punnets, depending on the instructions. I waited and nothing happened, save for the odd pak choy.

Still I wasn’t perturbed, there were many reasons. The dog got a few of the punnets. I had watered with a watering can, thus likely washing the seeds away. And I had let the punnets dry out - a seed no-no and my biggest challenge. I began planting everything in punnets, even when the instructions said sow direct. I was rewarded with a few beetroot seedlings but still the punnets dried out.

I tried putting the punnets in the shade of an established plant with no success. Then I tried keeping them in the warm shed, moving them outside when the first shoots appeared. I was rewarded with a couple of sprouting snow peas, only to have them consumed by slugs, snails and caterpillars. Sam got sick of having them in the shed and I forgot to water. Fail.

A few people suggested dedicated seed trays. Instead I put my punnets in a sealed plastic container. Still no luck – I can’t even remember why. I bought a mini-greenhouse but then put it in a position that was too hot. I moved it. I tried watering with a spray bottle so my watering can didn’t wash away the seeds, but I wasn’t vigilant enough. Let’s face it, I have a complete lack of dedication to the watering process and apparently near enough is not good enough.

And then, jackpot! I put plastic containers inside the greenhouse, then I put my punnets in the containers with a little water in the bottom. A few things grew.

And then I went overseas for a month.

Fast forward a month or two, and summer storms have wiped out the greenhouse a couple of times. A few weeks ago I bought some seedlings. I think we’ve come full circle.

Have you got any top seed raising tips? Or maybe you have your own story of gardening heartbreak.

Heirloom Tomato Salad

Three years ago today Sam and I got married. Three weeks before that, Sam’s Aunt Jane and Uncle David gave us this amazing Dinosaur Designs platter. We were incredibly touched, both by the generosity of the gift and by the beauty of the piece. I’d like to think that we will cherish every wedding present and remember who gave it to us (so far, so good), but this one is particularly notable.

I have always thought that this platter deserves a colourful salad, although I’ve not yet been game enough to serve beetroot on it. I pictured a bright red, yellow and green salad of heirloom tomatoes however I haven’t been able to grow any (more on that later) and such delicacies are hard to find in Tamworth.

 Fortunately, all of my tomato salad dreams came true last week, when a family friend and my in-laws offloaded a kilo or so of Digger’s Heirloom collection.  

 Wash all tomatoes before cutting in to rough chunks and placing in a large mixing bowl. Preserve variety by considering each tomato’s shape and by slicing bigger tomatoes into thick horizontal slices. Drizzle generously with extra virgin olive oil – I used Chapman Hill New Norcia – and sprinkle with sea salt flakes. Turn gently in the bowl to ensure an even coverage, adding more oil and salt as you go, then leave for an hour.

Arrange tomatoes on your own beautiful platter, reserving the juice in the bottom of the mixing bowl. Taste the juice, adjust for seasoning and add a splash of red wine vinegar if you would like a sharper flavour, before pouring the juice over the tomatoes. Scatter with basil, pepper and buffalo mozzarella (if you have any – I used feta) and serve at room temperature.

Green green thumbs

With more than six weeks of Autumn behind us already there has been much excitement about autumn produce, so it seems appropriate that I write about our vegetable garden.

Starting a vege patch was a condition of our move up north, as far as I was concerned. I'm not sure where the motivation came from, but I was determined to grow food. I envisaged espaliered apple trees, fully established citrus, laden fig trees and maybe even pomegranates. Instead, I have a bare house block and next-to-no gardening knowledge. And so begins my gardening journey. I have been assured it is one that will provide boundless satisfaction and a little heartache, and it will never end.

You have to crawl before you can walk, so we have been planting little and planning lots. But the vege patch is underway. I have to admit it has been more successful that I thought, with very little human input, thanks to rainy yet warm weather.
Summer produced an abundance of beans, basil and cucumber, which have all just about come to an end. I know I have to dig up the gone-to-seed basil, but I'm feeling more than a little emotionally attached. For so many years I saw a few straggly sprigs growing in pots in my South Melbourne courtyard. This summer I had basil up to my waist.

In their place I hope to grow snow peas, chicory, watercress and leeks. Parsley, thyme and sage are still going well, although the chives were suffocated by the prolific basil.

We built a no dig garden, a term which has recently seemed far more technical than it needs to be. Stephanie Alexander's Kitchen Garden Companion recommends a list of ingredients longer than that of the recipes. Pea straw, lucerne, newspapers, seaweed fertiliser, manure, Hydrocell, organic compost and so on.

This six-layer method recommends quantities suitable for a 1 metre x 1 metre garden. As we have a space nearly three-by-three, the scientist in me decided we needed 3 times the quantities and suddenly our vege patch was looking very expensive indeed.

So, we took some shortcuts - especially after the assistant at the local landscape supply store politely pointed out that we would not fit three cubic metres of soil in a box trailer. (For future reference, a box trailer holds 0.5 cubic metres).

The final result? One layer of cardboard, a layer of lucerne, a layer of three-in-one (compost, manure and soil), another layer of lucerne, and another layer of three-in-one. And it seems to work. We didn't follow a "recipe" or get too technical (or rather, we did, then saw the light), we just got on and did it.


So here's to some happy Autumn growing. Let's hope it's as fruitful as the Summer crop.

From Melbourne to Tamworth

For five fun years this New South Welshman (Welshwoman?) has lived and breathed Melbourne. A 12-24 month stint south of the border morphed into a love affair with Victoria's capital. Husband S-bo and I loved the restaurants, the cafes, the markets, the bay. We loved the Swans at the G and the Boxing Day Test and of course we loved the tennis and its epic five-setters. But, this good thing has come to an end: S-bo and I have packed up our lives and moved to Tamworth, NSW.

Of all the gourmet Meccas in regional Australia, Tamworth is probably not one of them, but we have followed lifestyle and family. A quote I thought most apt when we were debating the move was by Newcastle poet, Keri Glastonbury, when discussing her move from Sydney to Newcastle at the 2011 Emerging Writers Festival. “Sometimes you have to give something up to get something better.” Have I got something better? Time will tell (and I have very few doubts) but I have certainly given a lot up by leaving Melbourne’s food scene.

We've been here for three months, we have a house, a yard, a dog and a vege patch, but there's a lot more to discover. I hope you'll join me as I taste local produce, test out cafes and restaurants and foster my vege garden. Not to mention learning how to master an electric cooktop ...