The Tasmania Pantry

By Eloise Emmett

The Tasmania Pantry won the Best Local Cookbook at the Gourmand Cookbook awards. With 30 years of experience cooking in restaurants and kitchens around Tasmania, qualified chef Eloise has developed, photographed and styled each recipe to perfection. This book contains over 60 new recipes to cook with gorgeous Tasmanian produce like o

• Language: English
• Publisher: EloiseEmmett
• Release date: Jul 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9780994341655

Book preview

The Tasmanian Pantry Cookbook

Living in Tasmania, we are so lucky to be connected to our food. I had a wonderful childhood in the country, and today my own children spend loads of time in the country too - either around our home on the Tasman Peninsula or at the family shack on Bruny Island. I remember my Dad bringing home buckets of fresh fish and seafood and chasing the (slightly scared!) kids around with a crayfish. We picked or pinched apples from the orchard next-door, and hoped to not get caught by the farmer! I remember the stench of mutton birds slow cooking for days and running around green fields collecting giant mushrooms. We would wake up in the morning at our family shack to see uncle Paul had left a row of skinned wallabies, hanging up on the clothesline. I still remember Aunty Julie with a simply enormous bag of baby onions to pickle, and I have not so fond memories of my Mum’s rabbit stew and the fun, and pain, we endured blackberry picking all summer. All these experiences added up to me having a real love of real, high quality food. I love to know where it comes from, and I love to eat it!

We now have a health crisis with obesity. This puts a strain on the heath system and is frustratingly preventable. I am happy to admit that I am a packet food snob. Although sugar, salt and fat each have a place in a healthy diet, these are also natural preservatives - so any packet food will have an excess of one, or all three of these to preserve it - even when it is labelled ‘healthy’ or ‘natural’! I think packet food is for convenience, and is for occasional use. But rows and rows of healthy packet food appear in the supermarket these days, convincing us that we are too busy to find the time to prepare a meal. I also think the argument of commercialised fast food chains being a cheap place for a family meal is completely wrong – I could pick up a prime cut of meat at my local farmer’s market, along with locally grown veggies, for the same price as a family meal at a fast food restaurant, and cook a beautiful, healthy meal for my family instead. Any qualified nutritionist will tell you our diets should be made up of mostly fresh vegetables, with fruit and protein and whole grains, and once you are organised with these products in your pantry - it really is easy. I am shocked and saddened when a teenager working in a supermarket asks me what a cauliflower is because he cannot identify it or look up the button on the till. I’m bored and sick of hearing about the latest elimination diet. Diets don’t work, ever! Furthermore, some of those diets endorsed by celebrities are dangerous and then push the price of certain foods that should be accessible to everyone, sky high!

Weight loss if required is only achievable through expending more calories than you consume and eating the correct nutrients. Sometimes checking in and calorie counting is a good thing for all of us, as it makes you think twice before handing a packet of biscuits to the kids to keep them quiet at after school activities! But I want my kids to have a good relationship with food. The best parenting advice I ever read was to provide my children with 3 healthy meals and 2 healthy snacks - and they WILL eat. It works, and it is simple. They won’t starve themselves, but they also probably won’t eat their veggie sticks if there’s a biscuit on offer instead! Children won’t eat dinner if they are full of snacks either. Good delicious home cooked food can be healthy. Good health and good, delicious food can co-exist.

Cooking your food, proper old-fashioned meal planning and knowing what is in your food really it is the only healthy diet – and this should be coupled with a healthy active lifestyle. For example, carbohydrates are not the devil. If you eat porridge for breakfast, sushi for lunch and pasta for dinner, and you’re putting on weight, carbs are not the problem - all three of these meals are perfectly healthy in a balanced diet, but it is just poor meal planning to blame. When did we get too busy to cook? When did we get too busy to plan our meals properly? Shouldn’t feeding our family properly be a priority? When did buying a jar full of sugar & salt called easy tomato pasta sauce become SO MUCH easier than quickly chopping a onion and garlic and some actual tomatoes? When you think about it it’s not really easier…at all. So I’m not claiming that the recipes in this book are all health food. As much as I would love to, we don’t eat butter chicken and black forest trifle every night, but we do enjoy them occasionally. I certainly don’t put toffee apples in the school lunch box but we do love making them a few times a year as a fun family activity, because after all, food is also for pleasure. I believe in all things in moderation - I certainly love a glass of wine so I am not going to stop my kids having the occasional treat. If they have the occasional soft drink I try to make sure it comes from a boutique family producer and they now prefer these choices.

You know what else? Cooking can be actually enjoyable and not a chore. If you hate cooking, why not try and change your mindset? Plan your meals, feel proud that you are feeding your family properly and feel happy when you support a local business. I don’t want my kids to have a fear of food but if they are having a treat I would much prefer it to be something they have prepared with love, or being involved in it’s preparation – whether it’s picking strawberries to make the jam for Monte Carlo biscuits or making toffee apples.

This book is a collaboration of recipes supplied by chefs and suppliers around Tasmania, for you to cook in your home, hopefully, with good friends and delicious Tasmanian wine or beverage! I hope you enjoy.

Eloise Emmett

Acknowledgements

Thanks to all the readers of eloiseemmett.com and Instagram and Facebook followers who inspire me to create new recipes regularly.

Thanks to my workshop, event and dinner guests at Little Norfolk Bay Events and Chalets, who taste all the recipes and inspire me to create new dishes.

Thanks to my family, my husband Brendan and children Maggie, Stephanie and Oscar who are happy to pop on a good shirt for a photo and enjoy all the foods.

Thanks to Kylie Berry, Stokely 9 Design, for the beautiful design and support with the creation of this book.

Thanks to Arwen Genge for helping with the cooking for the recipe photos..

Thank you to Katharine Burke for adding her lovely words to the recipes and Sarah Carless and Bernie Carr for editing the book.

And a big thanks to all the sponsors and recipe contributors that have made this book possible and who have been so helpful, encouraging and enthusiastic to work with on this project:

The book is divided into