Feast: Grow, Cook, Eat

By Gabrielle Chan

From the nation's capital comes a delicious collection of the most popular recipes and horticultural tips from listeners, chefs, cooks, gardeners, providors as heard on 666 ABC Canberra. A must-have guide to planting, growing, buying and cooking food in Canberra and the surrounding region.
From the garden to the table, FEASt is your guide to the seasonal produce, providores and favourite tastes of our nation's capital.FEASt is the perfect introduction for locals and visitors wanting to discover the tastes of Canberra's famous growers markets and local food scene. this collection of recipes and profiles of local cooks, gardeners and chefs brings together the most requested tips and moreish tastes of our bush capital - as featured in 666 ABC Canberra local radio's annual sustainable food festival. FEASt celebrates the quality of regional produce, from growing perfect backyard tomatoes and cabbages to cooking the tastiest laksa or apple pie.Includes Graham 'Willow' Williams's monthly plant and harvest guides for the ACt.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Jun 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780733331145

Gabrielle Chan

The book showcases the talent-base of ABC Canberra from Breakfast with Ross Solly to afternoons with Genevieve Jacobs and to the joy of the weekends with Greg Byliss -- and their most popular stories about local produce and providors. 666 ABC Canberra is proud to be the leading radio and online station in the national capital region. 666 is consistently ranked as one of the top radio stations in Canberra by the Nielsen Media Research rankings - an impressive result, particularly given strong commercial network competition.

Book preview

There’s not much in the natural landscape that is more enchanting than a Canberra autumn. The rich colours of the leaves changing against a backdrop of summer-parched paddocks provides a uniquely inland-Australian picture.

Autumn heralds the beginning of work on the winter vegetable patch, while harvesting the last of the summer fruits and vegies. There are still tomatoes and eggplants to pick, and the figs and quinces are coming on too.

In March, Graham ‘Willow’ Williams suggests harvesting your potatoes and storing them dry. But whatever you do, don’t brush them or wash them; they’ll keep longer if stored straight from the patch in a cool, dry place, away from any light source. Also harvest your apples, pears, grapes, raspberries, strawberries, lemons, beans, corn and sunflowers.

Now is the time to plant (or transplant) winter vegies like broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprouts, silverbeet, spinach, radicchio and Chinese cabbage.

In April, it’s time to start planting lettuce, kohlrabi, leeks, parsley, spinach, peas, fennel, beetroot, rhubarb and snow peas. Don’t forget the kitchen herbs like oregano and, of course, the staple, garlic.

You can harvest those classic autumn fruits such as persimmons, pomegranates, quinces and nashi pears, plus chestnuts and walnuts. You may still have pumpkins, beans, tomatoes and potatoes to bring in and store as well.

And while you’re enjoying the fruits of your labour, don’t forget to store seeds for next year’s crop. Collect seeds from beans, lettuce, tomatoes, chestnuts, walnuts, pumpkins, sunflowers and parsley.

In May, you could plant broadbean seeds in double rows, adding a couple of handfuls of lime to sweeten the soil before planting. By now you should be harvesting some of the young leaves from kale, chard, spinach, radicchio, loose-leaf lettuce and bok choy.

The citrus fruits – grapefruit, oranges, lemons and mandarins – can be harvested before the major frosts hit. Protect your young citrus plants from frost.

Cut back any Jerusalem artichokes and dig up tubers. Turn compost over and cover to keep the heat in. Collect the leaves from deciduous trees and pile up to form leaf mould that will be the basis for your valuable mulch in the spring. Cut the raspberry canes, asparagus foliage, mint and lemon balm back to the ground.

While you’re at it, don’t disregard the maintenance of your patch. Pull out all the summer crops and weeds that may harbour insects and diseases. Dig over any fallow plots that are not in use. This allows the beds to rest and exposes weed seeds to frost, thus reducing the weed seed bank in the soil.

Now enjoy the bounty of your harvest with the wonderful recipes that appear later in this chapter.

Caroline Salisbury’s nutrition note: Herbs add more than just flavour – they’re also potent sources of salicylates, or natural aspirins. Tea and peppermint are rich sources of these.

The dynamic duo of the vegie patch

by Joyce Wilkie

A dirt-under-the-fingernails vegetable grower, mostly decked out in an old shirt and some grubby, knee-padded work pants, together with a glamorous, worldly radio presenter is not your usual ABC Radio combination.

I met Genevieve Jacobs early in 2005 when she was working at Open Gardens Australia and they chose to open Gundaroo village to the public. Allsun Farm – a tiny, organic, mixed vegetable, fruit and egg operation, which I run with my husband, Mike Plane – qualified as one of ten interesting gardens worthy of a visit. It wasn’t long before Genevieve and I were heading up a team to organise what turned out to be a spectacularly successful event.

Looks are often deceiving, and in this case commonalities far outweigh the differences. Genevieve springboards off a long family history of broadacre farming, whereas I grew up in the city and moved to a farm when I was thirty. However, we are both educated, committed to our families, enjoy successful and diverse careers and have organised not-for-profit events. We share a love of story-telling, and we’re both passionate about gardening, food, education and making the world a better place.

Allsun Farm focuses on seasonal fresh produce, and the farm–food connection is at the basis of everything Mike and I do there. More than seventy-five per cent of the farm is wooded, and production is carried out on two acres of intensively cultivated vegetable beds and polytunnels. A further two acres of strip-grazed pasture is occupied by around 150 laying hens, who provide eggs all year round. The emphasis is on fresh, high-quality produce and a relationship between the grower and the customer. Allsun markets its produce directly to restaurants and subscription customers.

We also have an abiding interest in sharing our knowledge through workshops, open-farm weekends and organic-farming networks. Maine-based farmer and author Eliot Coleman (The New Organic Grower) is both a friend and an inspiration. We believe that farming can be both environmentally and financially sustainable on a small-scale, locally based level. We’re keen to invest in the future of farming and share hard-won knowledge with other growers, students and family farmers who envisage a different future for agriculture based on a close connection to the soil.

Those same ideas have also been the basis for our monthly program at 666 about picking, cooking and then enjoying produce fresh out of the garden. Together we have used corn, carrots, quinces, wheat, tomatoes, onions, cabbages, zucchinis, chickens and more to discuss not just how food is grown and cooked, but also why. Good friends, good gardening and good food have created a true feast that literally makes its way straight from the paddock to the plate.

Get motivated in the garden

by Kim Lester

Before the weather cools down, autumn is the perfect time to get busy in the garden. According to horticulturalist and ABC1 Canberra weatherman Mark Carmody, even as the temperatures cool, the soil in the vegetable patch is still warm after three months of summer.

‘With the average daytime temperatures around twenty-five and with an average of eight hours of sunshine, plant growth will be optimum during March,’ Mark says. ‘The average overnight minimum for March is eleven degrees, so that’s not too hot, not too cold, allowing plants and vegetables to make good use of available water, and fertiliser, resulting in a growth spurt.’

Autumn is the time to prepare your vegie patch for winter crops like cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage. Even if your garden thrived throughout spring and summer, producing abundant amounts of zucchini, squash, tomatoes and pumpkin, it’s now time to start adding compost to your bed.

‘Even though it may seem like you have a good amount of high organic matter,’ says Graham ‘Willow’ Williams, ‘you can never have enough. So, especially for your winter crops, you still need to bring in and replenish more compost and organic matter of some description.

‘Organic matter can be a lot of things. If you don’t have compost, just go and get a bag of blood and bone and spread that around. That’ll bring the organics up into the soil. I like to use natural leaf mulches or just straw as well – because that keeps the moisture in as well as breaking down and adding more organic matter to the soil.

‘It’s not only good for growing, it actually makes the plant more able to cope with diseases and pests. It’s a bit like being a human: if we eat too much junk we’re going to get sick.’

March is also the time to harvest the last of those summer vegetables like corn and tomatoes – particularly recently, as the wet weather and cooler summers led to a late bloom for tomatoes.

Keith Colls from the Canberra Organic Growers Society reckons the city’s community gardeners will be busy in the kitchen. ‘They’re starting to harvest, collecting all of the fruits of their hard work during spring,’ he explains. ‘In March/April, a lot of the activity is actually harvesting stuff, preserving it, pickling it, freezing it, doing whatever.’

‘Autumn is the time to prepare your vegie patch for winter crops like cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage.’

Charnwood Community Garden

by Kim Lester

There are plenty of benefits to living in the bush capital, and one of them is the Charnwood Community Garden on the ACT’s suburban outskirts. Community gardens are becoming more and more popular as people enjoy the benefits of working together to harvest locally grown food.

Charnwood’s location, bordering the ACT’s rural surrounds, means they have plenty of space there – enough for a couple of dozen or more large plots and a small orchard. Haydn Burgess is the convenor at the garden.

What brought you to a community garden in the first place, Haydn?

‘The last few years I’ve become more and more interested in growing food, for all sorts of reasons, both personal and, I suppose, even political. I love the concept of a community garden, that people are coming together. I mean, admittedly, with the community garden model we have, they’re individual allotments, but it’s still bringing people together to share knowledge, share their produce, and I wanted to be a part of that.

‘I’m fairly new to growing food and growing food organically, and it’s a great place to learn from other gardeners who have been doing it for a long time. Growing fruit and vegetables can be trial and error, and so you just need to get that experience. But also you fast-track your experience by learning from others.’

This must be one of the larger community gardens in Canberra.

‘I’ve seen four or five others and this one is probably the largest. We’re lucky to have that space, and we’ve got some nice established trees both in and around the gardens that provide a bit of shelter and shade and protection. And some of the plots are a good size, so we’re very lucky here. It’s a wonderful spot. There are about thirty plots, and some gardeners have more than one plot if they’ve proved to be good gardeners.’

What are some of the fruits and vegies growing here?

‘It’s been a very good season for potatoes, for beans, for strawberries. We’ve grown some reasonable corn. Across the board, tomatoes have been a bit of a challenge for gardeners recently. The summers have been quite mild and some plants need a bit of heat to ripen up. But the tomatoes are starting to ripen and there’s now a reasonable crop.’

It’s nice that you have the space for some fruit trees as well. You have a bit of an orchard here.

‘We’ve come to a decision recently that gardeners can adopt trees from that orchard. We were trying to manage it communally but we’ve decided it’ll work better if individual gardeners take on one or more trees.’

What have you learned since joining the Charnwood Community Garden?

‘I’m learning to source inputs more cheaply – inputs being compost or liquid fertiliser. For example, comfrey, which is a herb that grows very well – in fact, it can become a weed. I’m growing that and making a tea from the comfrey leaves, that’s a wonderful liquid fertiliser.’

Designing a great meal

by Gabrielle Chan

At first glance, food and architecture are not natural bedfellows. But Pasquale Trimboli, of Italian and Sons and Mezzalira restaurants, sees many connections. There is the design element of what is presented on the plate, the experience of the restaurant atmosphere, and the creativity of cooking.

‘Restaurants are not solely about what you put into your mouth,’ Pasquale says. ‘It’s all to do with the experience. Restaurants are undergoing a shift towards an experience that cannot be duplicated. After all, they have always been a place for people to come together and share company in comfortable conversation and feel a sense of belonging.’

The Trimboli family has long been involved in the food business. They opened one of the first Italian delicatessens in Canberra, and as a child during the 1970s, Pasquale worked away in the shop with his siblings. He also spent a lot of time in the kitchen with his mother. ‘We were always working around food, and if you are constantly surrounded by it, you want to better understand it. As children, it was more to do with what flavours go with what.

‘My dad and my uncle were always at the forefront of their game. They were the ones importing the olive oils, the prosciutto and the cheeses, which at the time weren’t that fashionable. But they persisted with it, because it was a big part of their culture.

‘Those ingredients are now an essential part of everyone’s pantry. That is helped along by the fact that we are part of a different society now – everyone travels a lot and people are looking for the cultural experience beyond the dinner plate.’

It was not always that way, of course. Pasquale had the archetypal migrant child experience of intriguing his fellow students with exotic delicacies such as pickled eggplant sandwiches. Come university days, however, he found himself being introduced to a whole range of food he had never tried before, like Vegemite and two-minute noodles.

If he had a childhood dream, it was to play soccer, but his father instilled in him a strong work ethic. When Pasquale completed his studies, he felt compelled to get a ‘proper job’, so he settled on architecture for the creative edge. In 1994 the Trimbolis branched out to a coffee shop in the city markets, selling Italian pastries and panini, and went on to set up Mezzalira. The family businesses remained Pasquale’s second job until he came to that fork in the road where he had to decide: food or architecture?

Food won.

Since then, the Trimboli family has established its second restaurant, Italian and Sons, which was awarded a chef’s hat by the Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide in 2012 for the second year running.

Like the rest of Australia, Canberra has embraced Italian cuisine and the availability of suitable produce has only improved with our increasingly educated palates. ‘In the late ’90s it was a lot more difficult to source local produce, because we didn’t have the local markets and producers,’ Pasquale notes. ‘We used to have to fly a lot of things in, from Melbourne, live marron from WA, bocconcini from Queensland. But over the last four to five years we have seen it change significantly, and even the farmers market at EPIC [Exhibition Park In Canberra] are doing some great stuff.’

His chefs visit the markets regularly to meet the producers and build a relationship. ‘It’s an opportunity for the apprentices to understand the food, where it’s grown, the difference between a good tomato and a bad one, or the differences between certain fish. It’s not just the end product, especially for Italian cuisine – it’s all about the simplicity of the produce. And if the produce isn’t anything much to start with, it’s going to be hard to turn it into something quite tasty.’

Pasquale believes that the trend in restaurants is swinging back to a more straightforward style of food. ‘We have found people are reverting back to the simple things, they are a little tired of foams and science-lab kitchens and they want the simplicity. They are going against the Michelin stars and awards – people are more educated, not only with the palate, but also their minds. People can see beyond that and they decide: you are only as good as your last dinner.’

Caroline Salisbury’s nutrition note: Olive oil is a vital component of the Mediterranean diet, the key benefits of which come from the consumption of the