8 August 2008
I arrived in Tassie the slow way, on an overnight boat, with my car buried in the hold. I travelled with Nick, my cheesemaker mate, and Ian, the other cheesemaker after a couple of days at the Taste of Slow behind Melbourne’s Fed Square. We filled the wee bunkroom with the smell of washed rind and red wine and I slept like the deceased. The air tight room soon smelt like the recently deceased. Cheese is like that.
Awoke to a brilliant Tassie morn and drove straight to Sheila’s house. A friend’s mother, she was expecting us and had the bacon and frypan at the ready. Jar after jar of preserved fruit filled the room, and after runny eggs we raided the back yard. Two types of nashi, so small they’d fit in a toddler’s palm, filled our crates. We picked hundreds of tiny apples and then gorged ourselves on mulberries.
For the uninitiated, mulberries are a deep purplish red. Squidgy and ripe, and impossibly fragrant, as you reach up for one others brush your clothes and skin. We ended up looking like we’d been at a massacre, faces smeared with berry juice. I learnt that we should’ve picked them naked; it’s the only way to save your clothes. The result was three grown men, giggling like schoolgirls at the flavour, the stains on our hands and shirts giving us the appearance of the criminally insane.
I took the long route down to Hobart, pausing at Cradle Mountain for some wilderness and platypi and 1500 year old King Billy and Pencil Pines. Saw a wombat with a pair of woolly legs poking from its backward facing pouch. Visited Rodney who’s setting up a cooking school near New Norfolk, a half hour north of Hobart Town, too, and his lovely wife Severine and their pudding of a son, Tristan. They have a gorgeous old wooden school that’s being converted to the new cooking school, and the garden is full of things to eat. I think I’m ruined for strawberries forever; these were blissfully sweet, and racy with acidity.
After that it was down to Bruny Island.
During the week I dine out in North Hobart. I plan on just one dish and a glass of wine, and end up having three dishes and three wines. Pork cheek pie with saffron and tomato, topped by “Scottish” puff is extremely good, the pastry a knockout. Churros are, as always, a bit doughy.
The next day I’m late to the island to help prep for the new café menu. Nick has had the kitchen to himself for a few hours, and much of the prep is done. The chicken, leek, pink eye and riesling pie is superb. Braised chickpeas with chorizo are smoky with Spanish paprika. I’ve brought a salmon, which will be cured in sugar and vodka, thinly sliced and served with a stunning new barrel aged fetta. The puff for the top of the pie is from a local bakery.
I busy myself with ice-cream. The rose version is rippled with strawberry. I use an excessive amount of rhubarb to milk in another, and that’s still not enough. The honey and walnut is more successful, except the walnuts must go in at the end, which isn’t so easy through the small hole in the churn.
We work late, and relatives show up. Just as we sit down for bought hunza pie (and a more edible potato version), Nick is called out as the volunteer ambulance driver.
To go with the pie there’s salad. Gorgeous slut red tomatoes, barely larger than golf balls, are chopped and salted to make the juices run. I drizzle them with olive oil and find a lemon to squeeze over the top. I find a small, compact cos lettuce and a sturdier iceberg and tear half of each into bits that will fit the mouth. No need for anything else.
We dessert on my first attempts at honey and rose water ice-cream from the week before, one with just enough flavour, the other too rose scented for comfort. I leave some pie on the bench, and we’re asleep by the time Nick arrives home.
21st March
Good Friday. The oven is lit and we’ve had a pretty slow day. Not many through the gate, or for the new café.
I have the leg of a Wessex Saddleback pig. They’re rare, and there are only about 100 breeding sows left in the world, I think. Maybe 99, now, or at least one boasting a wooden leg. A bloke grows them not very far from the ferry terminal to the island. The leg’s skin is scored in big fat lines, about the width of a fifty cent piece, not the wimpy thin ones you’d have for a home oven. The leg is heavily salted and left to dry in the cool, Bruny air. It will take a couple of hours to cook, at least.
The vegetables include Dutch cream potatoes and organic garlic from the Bream Creek Show. I break the bulbs to release the cloves but Nick just slices them in half. Neither they nor the onion is peeled. And neither is the potato.
There are nearly 20 of us for dinner, and that worries us. It’s great to have a mob over, but is there enough food? The pork will suffice, thanks to three vegetarians. Included in the crowd are Nick’s sister and her hubby, with their two daughters. A friend Jenene is there with her two kids, too. Ross and Emma join in. Ross has been working hard on the cheese all day as the newest cheesemaker, and Emma runs the cheesery cellar door. She pretty much holds things together.
For dinner a huge yellow marrow is filled with beetroot and fetta on one half, and roasted. The other half is filled with pork shoulder we’ve minced and laced with fennel seed: One for the vegos, one for us. There’s more of the beetroot and fetta as a salad, mixed with a black Russian tomato, fat and dark.
The pork leg takes seconds to crackle in the oven, with the top thermometer – embedded in the roof of the oven - reading over 300C. The skin blisters and even scorches in one tiny spot, so I cover it with foil. The oven’s hearth, where another thermometer lies, is about 250C, so I roast the pork with the door open. 90 minutes later and the pan is sizzling crazily, but when I pull off the foil the pork underneath the crackling is still cooler than my finger. It’s time to put the door on. Within fifteen minutes the leg has shrunk, cooking too fast to retain all of its juices. Within 25 minutes it’s still only warm inside, but I know that resting it will finish the cooking. And so it is, just a shade pink near the bone, and still juicy to eat. The flavour is delectably sweet and meaty, but not at all wild or offally. The crackling is incomparable, and as usual there isn’t enough of it.
We’re seated outside, on two tables under gum trees in the soft light coming from the cheesery. As it gets darker the weather is still enough for candles. The veg are gorgeous, despite having to be held when the pork wasn’t ready. All the veg except the marrow that is, which is watery and dull, proving that a small zucchini is so much better than a full blown one. The filling, however, is superb.
Jenene has made cake. She lives in an enclave of five houses on South Bruny, where there’s no power, except solar. The previous night she’d wanted a bath, and the water heater runs off her woodfired stove. So she gathered kindling in the dark and lit the stove and then felt the only right thing to do was use it. So she took some rhubarb sourced from an ancient local crown, used up some wild blackberries she’d gathered with the kids, mixed them with wholemeal flour and raw sugar, because that’s all she had, and tossed together a cake. It’s brown and a bit sticky topped and tall and heavy. We warm it gently in the oven, which is still well over 200C, and serve it with bay leaf and rhubarb ice-cream, which is probably the finest flavour I’ve made so far. The rhubarb is subtle, and I do love the flavour of the leaf.
March 22nd
Open the café again, and the pizzeria for the first time. Scale off the dough at 210g. The first order is in at three minutes to six, just as Nick’s ambulance pager goes off again. He hasn’t finished the heating or the seating, but the lights are in place, and it showcases a big blackboard menu hung in the trees. The place looks the goods. But Nick has gone from his café for more than two hours.
Family chip in and gather the outdoor table from the farm house. Some take turns to wash up and deliver pizze. We serve 48 people on the first night, most in the first 45 minutes. I have my head to the board, trying to hand stretch pizza dough, a skill I’d learnt at 6pm. Ross helps top them and Ian is in charge of the oven. They come out looking terribly good; all blistered edges and dark bums and scorched toppings. Sugo and Tom (a hard cow’s milk cheese), topped with basil and prosciutto. Four cheeses - Tom, Gabriel (white mould goat), Pan (goat blue) and a marinated fresh cheese ODO - which is given a top dressing of rocket after it comes from oven. A 1792 (washed rind) and potato version scented with rosemary. And a pork and fennel pizza on sugo with mushrooms. They are all knockouts, if you ask me.
Nick gets back at 8.30. The rush is over. We forget to put out the “closed” sign and four Japanese show up at gone 9.30. They order four milkshakes, one beer, two pizze and we set up a table in front of the oven. One is wearing shorts, long socks and ear muffs. They look hilarious and giggle crazily when Ross says Ian (with a shaved head) looks like a boiled egg, in Japanese, which is apparently a huge insult. Ian reckons it’s funny.
March 24th
Tristan’s first birthday. The invite was cute, complete with a poem and the way Rodney and Severine set up their garden was gorgeous. It was a hot day, hot enough for shorts.
A poplar was shedding leaves, big heart shaped golden leaves that drifted lazily to earth. The table was set up under an old oak tree, I think, with hay bales for sitting on. Home made black currant cordial sat in an antique brass spouted glass dispenser. The sandwiches were crustless, the cakes sweet, the sponge golden. I hadn’t eaten or drunk enough in the hours before we arrived, and I end up feeling crook. The long days and a cold were having an effect.
I head back in Hobart with a sore throat and a head that makes me feel like I’ve been driven over by a logging truck and a body that aches terribly.
My flatmate cooks pasta with flaked cured salmon, olive oil and lemon, which is just perfect.
26th March
Nick swings by my temporary digs in Hobart. We both feel a bit rough. Off to New Norfolk and we check out the amazing Drill Hall antique shop. Fall in love with the French baking rack. And the girl’s eyes who’s selling it.
This week there’s ice-cream to make. I’ve 40 litres of milk and a machine just waiting to churn it. 20 litres of milk at a time is hard to make into an anglaise, not just because of the 160 yolks you need. The curdle factor is terrifying. Spent the day making ice-cream and little else. It’s good, though.
While the cheesery boys are out on a fishing trip on Sunday, I, being the seasick one, stay in town. So I slow roast lamb shoulder with tomato and gremolata, which cooks while I’m at the movies. Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Great movie making. People say it’s a sad story. I didn’t find it sad. Or inspiring. Just fascinating.
There are four boxes of very ripe, ribbed tomatoes at the cheesery. So I head down to the island to make passata. 80kg is easier when the machine is electric. It’s borrowed from Rodney who has borrowed it from Luke, a very talented local chef. I churn another 8 litres of honey ice-cream, too.
The fishing trip was a huge success and the kitchen smells of the sea and blood. Ross breaks one tuna down into fresh steaks, the other is cut and boiled outside in brine for 3 hours. When it’s cool it will be bottled in oil and sterilised, ready to eat in a month. As it cooks, however, it smells like cat food. Luckily it tastes dreamy.
Dinner consists of sashimi blue fin and albacore, followed by both fish gently warmed and served with nicoise salad. The salad is made of the most gorgeous Dutch creams and Cygnet olive oil. It feels like a crime to say the potato was the best part, when such stunning fish has made an appearance. I fall asleep during No Reservations.
4th April
Last Wednesday I moved into my new house, which was built in 1865. It has 12 foot high ceilings and is made of convict brick. The moving men grumble about the steep driveway, but they shift everything safely and quickly. I’m left with so many boxes and no storage space.
It’s on a fairly busy road, by Hobart standards, with an ancient orchard as a yard. One pear tree is estimated to be 80 years old, another over 100 I took a bad photo with my new phone of the pears ripening as they should; off the tree so they don’t go floury. Alan and Kimm and Elliott (aged 5) are visiting from Sydney. I show them the brilliant Hill Street Grocer and Alan cooks beef snags and crushed bintjes and sliced carrots and baby beans.
On my first morning in my new house I wake to the sound of chainsaws. Hurricane strength winds (up to 176km an hour) have lashed this part of Tassie and a tree has crashed through the fence from across the road. It snapped a telegraph pole as it tumbled through the power lines, and the road is cut, so is the power and phone. Electricity lines are over the metal gate, but the power is out by the time I emerge to survey the damage. The cold snap the wind has brought is penetrating my soul. No hot water for a shower. I go back to my old place to thaw out.
The power comes on just at dusk. I have dinner at Salamanca. Wonderful meatballs with soft polenta and a decent lamb ragu on sadly clumped together pappardelle
The first meal on my own in my new house is too simple. I get back after a terrific lunch of rabbit and marquise (two courses, dummy) at Rodney’s to a cold house and decide on pasta. The place is sill a mess with boxes everywhere, and I haven’t filled the pantry. So it’s a little tin of tuna with penne rigate and agrumi (lemon infused olive oil).
For my first dinner guests in my new house I cook chicken and oat soup and tarte Tatin. I get the apples from the yard – golden delicious, the perfect variety according to my trip to Lamotte Beauvron, the home of the Tatin sisters in the Loire Valley. The tarte is dark and sticky and buttery and just about perfect. With organic jersey cream, well, all I can say is you should’ve been there.
Then finally, last Sunday, I took Alan, Kimm and Elliott over to Bruny for their first visit. We ate cheese and then went sand boarding on a dune on The Neck, the skinny isthmus where north and south Bruny connect. We slept like labourers that night.
So that’s about it, really, my new life. Sorry I prattled on so much. I’ll have other projects to tell you about soon, too.
In the meantime, did I tell you about the phosphorescence when we went floundering? Or the free range eggs at the CWA shop that are blue from silky bantams and are tiny wee things that cost just $2.50 a dozen? Or the mist on Mount Wellington, that strange monolith that overshadows my new life? Or did I tell you about how we yelled out "play Fleetwood Mac or rack off" to The Gimp (Ian, it’s a long story) at the Lunawanna hall on Easter Sundee night at the Bruny Island Blues and Roots Festival? Have I mentioned chocolate crackles as big as a child's head or a tarte Tatin with quinces as dark as a Bruny night and as fat as a fist? Or Ross's unctuous scrambled eggs on sourdough with wood oven roasted Snug butchery bacon and slabs of buttery sourdough bread on the deck? Did I tell you about the moon, and how it woke me at 1am each morning that I slept at the cheesery, making me think it was a dull 7am and time to start the coffee machine? Did I tell you that the woodfired oven we’re using is an Alan Scott oven, he who is famous in the US is living back here now, just north of Hobart?
Did I tell you about the milk spewing from the van after I pressed the wrong button as we pumped it from the dairy into tanks, and that Nick had forgotten to put the lid on the milk pod, so not all the slops were my fault? The town where we parked on and off for an hour smelt of sweet milk one day, and sour milk the next.
And did I mention that I'm supposed to be writing about other stuff both here and over there somewhere and that I’d rather be sipping a warm cup of tea and listening to someone play the acoustic guitar and eating a sugar and spice shortbread biscuit?
I probably did, and I'm boring you.