Haiku Friday

bent back and bent knees,
sand digging, looking for these.
clink, clink, clink, clink, clink

fantastic edible foods database

this site Plants for a Future - edible, medicinal and useful plants for a healthier world is an absoloute treasure trove of information. An incredibly user friendly and yet incredibly comprehenisve site. Add it to your lists. Its a great reference for foraging foods in your own garden and your neighbourhood. Seriously, really, go have a look, type in a plant and viola; its edibility rating, how its consumed, its other uses, its preferred environmental conditions. Its a gem. really. truly.

making black tea from your camellia japonica

Camellia sinensis is the common 'tea' camellia but we dont have any of those, we have japonica and sasanquas. Why cant these be used to make tea? What is it that makes its cousin sinensis the favoured leaf? Lots of searching around the web was not very forthcoming but Mansfields Encyclopedia of Agrcultural and Horticultural Crops offerered the few words i had been wanting to read... camellia japonica can be used as a tea substitute (and tobacco)! We couldn't really undersand why japonicas and sasanquas werent used for tea making and the literature is not full of loud warnings to avoid them due to being harmful nor why sinensis had been the favoured tea choice. So we concluded that sinesis was favoured as a tea crop as it is a more prolific bearer of tips during season and puts its energy into leaves and not pretty flower production. We did find information on tea seed oil or Camelia seed oil made from Japonica. Apparently in China and Japan it has many common uses; frying, salads, dipping sauce, and it has a high smoke point and a sweet flavor. Dried camellia flowers are also be used as a vegetable. Hmmmm, trying to think of a tasty how? Interesting.

Camellia shrubs are everywhere here in the Adelaide hills where the regional climate provides perfect camellia growing conditions; slighty acidic soil and cooler air temperatures. Urban foraging for your own tea leaves is a very viable idea, particularly as they rarely get sprayed for pest and disease control.

A 'spear and two flags' is how you tip prune a camellia for tea; three leaves a pinch. Our twenty rather well 'Sprung' Camellia bushes provided two bowls of prunings, but over time with more tip pruning it will produce more tips more frequently, also catching the spring flush of new growth may have helped as most had opened and grown.
It was a beautiful feeling to finger prune the tips, they were snappy and waxy and fresh between the fingers. After we'd collected what was available we sat and rubbed the leaves in our palms.
They crumbled surprisingly easily despite being so fresh and each batch required about three rubbings to generate a leaf matter the size required.
At this point we lay the crumbled leaf on a tray and removed the stems.

We left the crumbled leaves for 2 days in a dark cool spot to dry; the pantry and could have done three and tossed them around periodically. This proces of air drying essentially oxoidises the leaves and begins a fermentation The leaf bits turned brown and looked rather awful which is what is supposed to happen.

We then oven dried the fermented matter for about 20 minutes in a low oven.
Then we had a cup of tea.
The verdict? A little shallow in flavour but aromatic and it smells just like black tea! Low tanin. Whoopee! We think maybe a little longer to ferment, an extra day and a little more roasting may bring out some more flavour but we will certainly be experimenting with home grown organic japonica tea to keep us in our habit. Depth of flavour may be why sinensis is the tea choice but some further experimentation with ferment and drying times will tell us for sure. Two big bowls of fresh leaves made about a half a cup of dried leaves! Cheaper to use the japonicas than buying enough sinensis to meet our needs and waiting thet 3 year growing period! Im amazed at how cheap bought tea is! and now I understand 'hand rubbed' as a feature of swanky tea.

***morning after update: We reckon this tea is pretty high in caffeine content and its relaxant properties as we felt very chilled but couldnt sleep. A day brew only perhaps.

Just call me Molly Malone

My love of free food, wild food, foraged food, happy food is well known to you who read this Blog. Its something deep within me, a wonderful a sense of connection with nature, the environment, with the continium that is 'My Life'. I love it. One thing I look forward to each year is the start of Cockle season; November 1 here in South Australia. Over the past few years, cockle sizes have been diminishing and a shorter cockle season for the professionals last year was ordered in the hope of boosting both size and numbers of this years harvests. Im looking forward to seeing the impact of this shorter season.

I go 'hunting' cockles at Middleton, 'Cockle beach', where the Cockle train passes by with its puffing and choo-choo'ing, it makes for a lovely day. I thought, why look forward to this wonderful beginning with just my family? Is anyone interested in a Blog Cockle hunt sometime in November? I thought we could meet at the beach on a nice sunny day, 'hunt' cockles and then head back to 'our' beach house for some homemade fettucine alla Vongole or Chorizo and Vongole paella and then make our ways back to our respective city homes, beachy, salty, sandy and happy with a bucket or two of freshly collected cockles.

where did i come from?

Im not sure where my passion for ecological living comes from. The love of forests full of hidden edible treasures, the thrill of catching your own dinner, the skills inolved in boning and carving, the use of 'weeds'' and 'trash' to their full potential, the art of minimising expenditure and consumption, conserving energy. It all gives me a great thrill. Is it a mindset we're born with or is it created? Can we teach it? Is it a religion? Am i a zealot? Or is it just an interest that i have developed through years of reading and listening to theory and practice about urban and environmental ecology? I mean, i have loved Landline since I was a teenager!

At the heart of my love for all things eco i think is the fundamental challenge of doing things the smart way with the least amount of stuff, in the most artistic or creative way possible and with minimum disruption to natural ecosystems. Its smart living, not mindless living. Thats where my spirit is nurtured, in that moment, in that decision to take or make or change something in a way that is least disruptive to the world around me, knowing that the decision is made with the best of intentions. It requires knowledge, skill and thought. Consciousness. But really, what is it about the idea of self sufficiency that gets me just so excited? Seriously, why do i find the idea of rearing a pig, butchering it and then finding every possible way to cure and use it so enthralling? Why does foraging for mushrooms give me butterflies in my stomach? What is it with self sufficiency and food?

Whats going on ? Im a small c career academic with smallholder tendencies. Somethings gotta give.

Duxelle and Extract

i didnt want to put you off by telling you in the post title that its another mushroom post. This is what happens when you're into seasonal and local and you blog and you have a short mushroom season and a spot which is prolific. Sorry. Now you know, read on or exit at your leisure...

I should make this post four on my 'what to do with a glut of seasonal produce' posts!

You cant eat as much fresh mushroom as you can pick ( tell me- im not a huge mushroom fan but put me in a forest with thousands and I'll come home with kilos). So we have eaten them in sauce on pasta, fried on toast, stuffed and baked them, we have frozen some fresh and frozen some whole and dried heaps. What else?...we've still got kilos left (and we're planning on another picking this weekend??)


Enter Antonio Carluccios recipes for Mushroom Extract and Wild Mushroom Duxelle (dook-SEHL). A duxelle is a mixture made from minced or roughly chopped wild mushroom sauteed in butter with shallot, garlic, fresh bread crumb, and herbs. I think the duxelle looks particularly beautiful when made with these red pine mushrooms (saffron milk caps) as the colour contrast with the herb looks incredible. I hope they defrost just like this!


It is excellent to freeze and is used as an addition to soups, stuffings, sauces and to fill tarts and to top pasta. Did i say it freezes well? I cooked up about 4 pan loads of duxelle for the freezer, packed into small containers and we did eat a bit along the way...


The extract was simple. Cover chopped mushrooms with water. Bring to boil. Reduce to a simmer and add bay leaves, pepper corns, dried porcini, a splash of soy/sherry and cook for 40 min. Strain and squeeze solids, return liquid to pan and and reduce further until liquid is 1/2 to 3/4 in volume. Viola. Bottle. This will keep in the fridge for a while ( how long? im not sure) and can be frozen. I will use this for soups, sauces, stuffed mushroom, anything where i would add stock, actually Im chucking it around the kitchen a fair bit, anywhere i can. It can also be used as a condiment .



That might be my bloomin' lot.
* unless someone can tell me what else to do with a mushroom to preserve it other than pickling them!

so they look awful...

but they taste and smell divine. What to do with an excess of wild mushroom after you've given kilos away and eaten as many fresh as you can? You dry them. Perfect for soup, stock and risotto. 4kgs of mushroom now rest in a 8ooml jar after spending the night on trays on the wood heater.

Here's an excerpt from a piece on 'Hunting' in the Adelaide Review by Roger Haden, Gastronomy lecturer at Adelaide University.

"Over the years, wild fungi have had a bad rap, while the white button version known as “the cultivated mushroom” (Agaricus bisporus) has become the mono-cultural mushroom of choice. Now, thankfully, the meatier “large flat” and the more fragrant Swiss Brown have appeared on the scene. Yet nothing commercially grown comes close to the variety of flavour and texture of the wild species. The “piney” flavour of the very common Saffron Milk Cap (Lactarius delisiosus), which grows plentifully under older stands of pine trees, is indeed delicious (it’s the most popular wild mushroom eaten in Catalonia).


Once you’ve been on a hunt with a mushroom fanatic you’ll see how easily recognisable the edible varieties are. Moreover, what great fun it is to forage after this sometimes elusive prey. After a good shower of rain at this time of year, the fungi emerge in all their glory".

The adventure continues.
Im very addicted to this new behaviour. What is incredible is that we have discovered a very public place where the mushrooms are growing but no one else is picking them. Thousand of them, all walked past, kicked over, squashed underfoot. The damn things sell for $30 kg in the markets!
Crazy.

rhubarb and a chive update!

its occourred.

my new rhubarb plants are in. Im hoping for a big, bright, showy display right next to the studio. I put the rhizomes down to get a spade and noticed the amazing contrast of the red with with the purple wall. Home found. Decision made. New bed required. So the Bloke made a lush new bed from some great compost right in that space that needed filling.



And Ive put to rest my obsession with planting chives from seeds and, courtesy of the generous donations of Veggie Gnome (garlic) and Olive (regular), am now the very happy owner of a chive plantation!

May they thrive for me as they did for them.

And just coz i can, here's yesterdays mushroom haul; nearly 2kgs and tonights dinner. God, i could have kept picking them for hours except that just would have been uber greedy. A good brush off and some pasta is all thats required.

Saffron Milk Caps

Lactarius deliciosus. Delicious.

I was going to let the bloke try these on his own, better to lose just one parent than both, but the waft of the smell of them frying in olive oil and garlic after Id been out for a run, with no lunch behind me, threw my caution to the wind.

I didnt eat this beauty below which looks so sweet, but is so terribly bad for you. I merely took a pic of this newly emerged Agaric Amanita muscaria .


We found the saffron mushrooms around the periphal base of a group of pines, on a sloping site and tucked flat in the grass, not really in pine litter at all. If you weren't looking for mushrooms you would have walked right on over them. But we were on the hunt and two weeks after a good soaking and sunny days was bound to have encouraged something up! Being on the side of caution we picked only about 6 or so and we Googled them when we returned by looking through images of orange coloured mushrooms. We found an incredibly useful website for identifying Australian fungi.

Saffron Milk Caps or Red Pine Mushrooms
Concave cap with concentric circles - check
sticky and viscid when wet - check
crowded decurrent gills - check
squat orange stipe which is often hollow - check
Oozes a bright ornage latex ( milk ) when squeezed - check

They cooked longer than a normal mushroom to remove the slightly grainy and faint bitter aftertaste but tasted a little like chicken. They had a really nice flavour, and for me they werent too complex (mushroomy) or woody.


Apparently its a well known mushroom in Europe, here its an introduced species, well regarded but quite scarce, found in farmers markets occasionally. I think that its such an easily identifiable mushroom, you cant realy make an error in mistaking it for anything else. Actually, what gave me the confidence to imbibe was the fact that nowhere in our research did we ever find something like "often mistaken for..." or "easily thought to be something else which will kill you".

So i will return to our spot tomorrow and pick some more for my birthday dinner on Wednesday night! An easy mushroom find for the novice.
*update on saffron milk caps (red pine mushroon) here.

Forest Foraging

Ive written before about my love of free food. Foraging is just about my most favouite thing to do, especilly mushrooming. So with some pretty wet weather behind us, quite a few sunny days and a few bloggy reports on fungi sightings we thought it may be a good time to go 'shrooming.

We packed the bean and ourselves into the mobile unit and headed out to the old Gold dggings site at Jupiter Creek in Euchunga in the Adelaide Hills. We know that leaf litter is a favoured spot for fungi growth and had had read online that its not just under pines where they are found here, but Eucalyptus leaf litter too (Funghi of the Adelaide Hills book duly ordered. After trapsing through some beautiful bush we came across a man on his horse, but no fungi to be found anywhere. A week too early??

So we loaded back into the car and headed to another spot where we had found field mushrooms last year. Nothing. Yup, too early. We saw one gathering of fairy toadstools (the classic red with white spot) but nothing edible and non halucinagenic! On our way back to the car we came upon a whole bank of spiky pods mounded beside the sloping path.

Chestnuts!

Not something we see much of at all here, least of all when youre out mushrooming! We parked the boy safely and got to work, gently squeezing nuts out of their urchin homes with our shoed feet and collecting over half a kilo. We enjoyed roasted chestnuts after dinner, squishing their floury sweetness from their skins. Its amazing what you can find out there to eat when you start looking.

damn, its beautiful

Im off to the Barossa Valley this morning for work and damn, the weather is beautiful. Clear blue skies and sun, looking forward to seeing all the grape vines in their autumn glory and consuming some fabulous Barossa produce. Last week in country Victoria it nearly killed me walking past the op-shops knowing i had no time to stop and browse, thinking of all the treasures that are really only findable and affordable in rural second hand shops AND I WAS WALKING BY! So my lovely colleague has actually factored in some op shop time this trip! What a treasure! Thats my kinda work trip and my kinda colleague!

domestic microagriculture

could you...would you?
Need protein? want a source of meat thats low impact, low expenditure and low in use of water, kilojules, time,and effort? Its a free range, low impact, SLOW protein source we all have available and its incredibly underutilised; wasted even. Sounds great in theory. Just how green are you willing to be?

Folks, we're talking escargot.

Its simple. Gather 'stock'. Isolate for a week from its normal environment. Provide a daily feed stock of meal/bran and finish of with a salt bed to 'defoam' and 'viola' 7 days later you've got a lean, clean, primed and plumped, ready to go high protein source of ...rubber!

I may be writing about it but there is no way on earth im doing it. Yet. Gimme a bean anyday. For now, at least i know how.

apple, blackberry and frangipane tart

Taking a good pic of a half eaten pie at night time without lighting is tricky and i couldnt guarantee there'd be any left when the light was better in the morning. This tart was good. I mean really good. I love it when i can cook like this. 95% local ingredients (sugar definitely not from here). Blackberries picked that day on our walk and apples from our trees, home ground raw whole local almonds, and all else local biodynamic or organic fare. Its loca love in a tart.


Frangipane is one of those wonderful things in life, like basil and tomato or hazelnut and chocolate. I first discovered it big time in croissants aux amandes. If you havent tried one, they're heaven in a heart attack. Full of artery clogging butter but soo delish and a great way to use up old, stale going cheap croisssants. Stuff them with frangipaine and bake and serve with coffee on a weekend when the kids are away and you've got the paper and a sunny spot...I digress.

So, to hand were apples and blackberries. The blackberries were probably the last of the season, so many dried on the canes and wasps hovering closely ( so close i did get a jab in the palm when i grabbed a fat purple berry and its passenger, but not enough to swell) and apples, well we're still picking...bucketfulls. Im going to bottle most this weekend and am thinking maybe a cider??? But for now, with those two , its gotta be desert, right? I had both almonds and walnuts in the pantry but i figured a traditional almond frangipaine was the way to go.

Pastry - your choice. I used a cream based short crust, blind baked for 10-15 minutes after resting the lined case in the fridge for 10 min. This prevents it shrinking in the oven and its insides spilling out.

Apples - i used about 5 apples and simmered them in water for about 10 minutes to soften.

Blackberries - probably used about 1 cup fresh; frozen would be fine. Actually any other fruit or berry combo is fine. Use whatever you have to hand. This works well with anything; quince, plum, pear...

Frangipane
125g/4 oz butter
125g/4 oz sugar.
2 eggs -lightly beaten
150-200g almond meal
vanilla extract- 1 tsp or seeds from 1 pod
Cream together butter and sugar and then add the eggs slowly to combine. Add almond meal and vanilla and mix thoroughly and pour into cooled pastry case. Top frangipane mixture with fruit. Bake 25 minutes in 180 oven. Serve with cream or ice cream.

Its a good thing we had friends over to help out with consumption. You definitely dont want to be eating this type of food too often. Tonights desert; chilled whole apples. Penance.

Haiku Friday (i know its saturday but i forgot Friday )

warm salty mollusc
makes my body cringe and retch,
count me out on lunch

Haiku Friday

anticipation
of sticky, milky, figgy
summer fruit of love

onion weed pasta sauce

As a suburban block, our property is a relatively large area of land and that equates to lots of weeding. the land straddles a creek. on one side is the house, the vege patches, garden living areas and european trees and plants. on the other side is 'the reserve', home to a plantation of blackwoods, smaller native trees and bushes and potentially, lots of onion weed. (click here for a great picture of onion weed). onion weed requires perpetual monitoring early each spring so 'the problem' does not get out of hand. My husband usually spends a good 3 days at this time of the year doing an onion weed cull. when we were first dating, he cooked me a dinner with the fruits of his days work; Pasta with Onion Weed Sauce. as the culinary nazi in the family, i figured there was a reason that onion weed was not more utilised in a culinary fashion. Its main downfall... pretty much a lack of flavour. However, despite my laughter, he happily cooked up this sauce. So if youre game, here's the recipe.

1 days worth of onion weed 'pull', cleaned and stem removed from the 'pearl'
enough bechamel sauce for each serve of pasta ( i think my dislike started about here)
salt n pepper
butter for saute

Saute onion weed pearls ( sounds nice huh?) in butter until they soften. Make bechamel. Add pearls to sauce. Stir and pour over pasta. Season.
Thats it.

If i were doing it again, i think i would add some chilli, parsley, anything to give it some oomph as the pearls are sooo delicate in flavour.
I have to admit i loved him totally for it.

*addendum* Attention all Raymonds friends. Please leave a comment and let me know why my blog hit from his MySpace profile for this post has gone through the roof! was it the 'weed'?