Food at work - round 2

Cycling to work not long before midday when it was 40.5^C (wearing a wet shirt for evaporative cooling) makes one feel tough. It most certainly would have justified a chocolate of some sort. But alas, I still can't hassle the vending machine for any of my favourite derivations of South America's best export. But, today I have a varied meal selection to entertain my taste buds.

I'm glad I spent an extra 2 minutes getting things out of the freezer for reheating at work. Included on today's menu was leftover vegie shepphards pie (for morning tea at 1430... gotta love shift work terminology!), homemade bread for cheese and tomato toastie followed by plums from my mum's tree and a peach from friend Fiona's tree, and apricots from Central Markets' Le Fruit (lunch at 1630). For "afternoon tea" (at 1845) I'm having leftover nut loaf with honey mushroom and onion sauce followed by more of the fruit I had with lunch. 3 varieties of coleslaw today would have caused me to stray I fear.

That's the thing with a challenge like this; when you've slaved your guts out in the kitchen for a week, hopefully you get some leftovers. I can imagine that if you are only eating local food then you'll have to "preserve the surplus" for leaner times or when you feel like something that's out of season. Stone fruit trees only have edible fruit on them for a couple weeks a year so you have to get the fruit off in a hurry before the birdies get them. They will then only last for a week before starting to shrivel up. I used to love stewed peaches in winter on my rice cream. I guess as rice isn't very sustainable I'll have to choose some other staple carb we grow to substitute. I know oats are local and creamy. I don't know how much cooking freekah would take to get this soft, but I'll give them a go.

I've just done a bit of a search on the feasibility of growing cacao locally and it looks like we'd need a greenhouse as they don't like frost. Apparently the flesh of the pods can be made into a drink, but as long as I can have the beans (or most importantly, fermented, then dried, then de-hulled, then crushed and ground, then processed remnants) I'll be happy. Any one interested in creating a cooperative that grows local chocolate for the masses of Adelaide? We may require several hundred thousand dollars in capital, but they fruit in 3-4 years. I'm sure we can sway some of the market, although we need to have more children to do the work on the cheap for us.

3 days to go...!

Well, I'm a bit tardy with entering my first blog but better late than never! Been too busy cooking local food, doing dishes, cleaning the kitchen floor and back at work so now it's time to blog!!

I am very glad to say that I have eaten 100% local since the 24th December. Well, maybe I need to qualify that - the salt and pepper have not been local (Australian though) and I have snuck in a few cups of tea and coffee! Sheldon has staunchly stuck to mint tea (we bought a tasty Moroccan mint plant from the farmer's market) since the 24th. I started with the mint tea too but found that when I got back to work bright and early on the 27th I just HAD to have some caffeine! I have now been having green or black tea everyday but this (apart from the salt and pepper) is still my only deviation away from 100% local food. Oh yeah, nearly forgot about the "choc attack" that I had one night... we have these dark chocolate buds we keep in the pantry for cooking and they just suddenly seemed irresistible so I downed quite a few of them. But that's it!

3 days (or 2.5 now) to go and will stick to the local challenge for each meal. This morning we had pancakes with fruit salad and yoghurt, lunch was an omelette and about to start cooking dinner - which will be vegetarian shepherd's pie.

What has this challenge meant for me?

Lots and lots of very yummy food, new skills and recipes in my forte but a very large increase in our food bill and many more hours of food prep and clean up that we wouldn't usually have. The more expensive food items seem to be the dairy: B-D Farm Paris Creek butter and milk are waaaay more expensive than I would usually buy and all the various cheeses that we have had are often 2-3 times more expensive than we would usually go for. Local garlic also seemed to be very expensive. But it has all been worth it!

It will be interesting to see much how local food will continue to be consumed by us when the actual challenge has finished. I am fairly confident that we will still have a reasonably high percentage of local food in our diet however we will definitely be including non-local caffeine and chocolate!

Time to go and make my local vego shepherd's pie.

Hope you are all eating as locally and wonderfully as possible! And may 2008 be the year of the local food revolution...

Pesto

And what a good pizza night it was- i was both inspired and scared when i heard the tales of gnocchi! :)
So while im not a full participant of the Local Food Feast (poor excuse of pre Christmas disorganisation- but future hope of a post Christmas Local Food Feast week) i made some easy pesto as by the local rules : )

2.5 cups of firmly packed basil (from home, but available at places such as the Adelaide Farmers Market)
2 large cloves garlic (also from Farmers Market)
1/2 cup of almond (from a friend down the road- but also available at Farmers Market)
1/2 cup olive oil (from home, but also available from Farmers Market)

And chuck it all in the food wizzzer : ) I hear it could be good with homemade pasta!

Optional addition of parmesan and salt (local of course!)

Amateur pasta-making!

Inspired by Kelly and Sheldon's mixed success with pasta-making (see the assorted posts about gnocchi below), Sophie and I decided to have a go at making this elusive, yet oh-so-common food staple from scratch. With the crucial assistance of friends Nial and Maddy we clamped a borrowed pasta machine to the table and set to work.

I spent most of the mixing process chatting with Nial, and thus missed most of the finer details of pasta making, but from what I could gather, it went something like this:

Nial and Sophie demonstrate the power and passion of home pasta-making

Ingredients
500g whole wheat flour (we used flour grown and milled by Four Leaf)
5 eggs (Kangaroo Island Free Range; apparently you can also substitute the eggs with "a cup of mineral water" - I presume "mineral water" is spring water)
a dash of water

1. Pour the flour into the bowl and make a hollow in the centre. Crack the eggs into the hollow, and mix with a fork until well-blended.
2. Knead with your hands for a while. If it's too dry, add a little water, or if it's too sticky, add a little flour - a good mix shouldn't stick to your hands.
3. Turn the mixture out onto a floured surface and knead further.
4. Cut the dough into pieces, and process each through the pasta machine. The pasta machine has a sequence of different settings to flatten the dough lumps into rolled pieces, adding a little flour with each pass. Following this, there's a couple of additional rollers for for spaghetti or fettuccine. Don't lose heart if you don't have a pasta machine! In Year 6 Italian, we made pasta by rolling the dough out on flour-covered school tables, using knives to slice it into lengths and then draping it on clotheshorses around the classroom.


5. Once the pasta has been sliced into strips, lay it out on tea towels and allow to dry for an hour or more. We made ours on a baking hot (37 degrees) Adelaide day, which no doubt shaved minutes off the drying time!


6. You now have pasta! You can cook it for 5 minutes or so in boiling water to eat it immediately, otherwise, apparently such pasta will keep for a week or so when stored in a cool, dry place.

Local Pizza Feast

On a balmy summer's evening, a collection of food lovers and participants in the Local Food Feast met at the Fern Avenue Community Garden for a local pizza feast, and to share the delights and challenges of a local Christmas.

An array of fine local toppings were on display, including chickpeas grown in a local backyard!

Bec, Vince & Jenny wrestle a pizza onto the paddle

Laura and Sophie on the steps of the strawbale cottage

Nikki kneading

Assorted pizza-eaters, with wood-oven

Monotony has begun

Unfortunately, the desirability in my menu has declined today. Breakfast and morning nacks were fine. Fine is a step down from the decadance of the last few days. We've had stone fruit salad, homemade pasta with home made tomato sauce, nutroast with sweet mushroom and onion sauce, honey sweetened homemade bread with home made mayo, pesto, Ediths goat cheese and local Haloumi to name a few.

Today is my first day at work since the 21st. There's no local fast food outlet within hours of hear. I had to take food from home to eat. For morning tea (1430hrs), I had coleslaw and potatoes with mushroom sauce leftovers from the nut roast. For lunch (1630hrs), I had potatoes and coleslaw with a side of mushroom sauce, followed by a couple of stone fruits. For afternoon tea (1830hrs), I had basically the same as I did for lunch. I have 2.5hrs to digest before I ride my bike home and hopefully there will be some lovely homemade locally grown and cooked wood oven pizza for me.

Our regional manager offered me some mixed nuts and plastic wrapped chocolate bits. I had to decline again. It wasn't as hard declining the food as it was saying no to your boss's boss's boss. Mick's a good bloke and we had a little chat about it.

I hate declining my vices. I'm sure it's good for me. I will admit I did succumb to 2 dark chocolate buds yesterday just to make sure I wasn't missing out on anything. They didn't do much for me; chocolate is better melted, but I have 123.5 hours before I can indulge in that again.

No I'm not counting down, I have a calculator.

Local food farce

Congratulations to everyone for such inspiring stories. For those who feeling a little despondant that they may have been "locally impure" with the odd cup of bioregionally imported coffee I have a tail that will make you look like a saint.


I was working on Christmas day which I didn't anticiptate being such a problem. How wrong I was. Like the rest of you I had put quite some thought and planning into what I would eat on the big day. Breakfast was easy. A simple meal of ripe guava, banana, bush lime and locally produced honey. Actually it was so good it was three simple meals. Then I went off to work. I should mention at this point that my workplace is in the middle of a large army base.


My preparation prior to the day was simple. As I've mentioned in a previous post I had identified that cheap, unprocessed food is local and outrageously priced sugar or salt saturated stuff is imported. There is nothing inbetween. So I went to the Honiara market and had a good look around. As an apetiser I bought some bananas. I'm hooked on these tiny sweet bad-boys! For main course I chose a traditional dish. The name seems to vary but sounds like Kissa. Its shredded sweet potato and casava soaked in coconut milk with gnarly nuts (like peanuts) and then wrapped in banana leaf. This is then cooked on a brazier (a wheel rim full of coals normally) and can be eated hot or cold. They are amazingly rich, filling and tasty. Desert was a similar sweet version. Banana and shredded coconut soaked in coconut milk and cooked in a leaf.


As I walked across to the mess with a colleague I explained the contents and reason for my mysterious parcel of foods. I should point out that armies are kind of strict. About EVERYTHING. Because there are around 1000 people, most of them 8 to a tent in the tropics during wet season they are nothing short of fastidious about food hygene and safety. An outbreak of gastro would spread through here like a tsumani. For this reason your handwashing is supervised and only when approved are you allowed into the mess. Similarly there are rules about taking any food with you out of the mess - specifically that you can't under any circumstances. The reasoning is sensible. Once you leave with food you may not store it appropriately and might make yourself sick.


All the food served in the mess is imported from Australia twice a week. Even the fruit which grows so well here comes from OZ. Only the bottled water - which is monitored by Aussie environmental health officers - is locally produced. I knew this so had already ruled out any of the mountain of Christmas fare which was on offer in the mess.


What I didn't know was that the entire base was a food quarantine and for the same reasons of safety no local food was allowed on the base. As I approached the mess having just finished my concise explanation of the local food challenge I was asked by a soldier on the door what was in my bag. Without thinking I proudly announced "my lunch!" "Fraid not mate" was the friendly but firm reply. With that the soldier unlocked (!) a contaminated waste bin and put my bag of tasty local supplies (which by now were causing a fair degree of salivation) in it. "Plenty of better gear inside anyway mate"


As I'm a vego my christmas lunch comprised roast potatoes and soggy carrots. Ho freakin ho!

Below: entrance to the mess, its nice they leave their assault rifles at the door.

Simple pleasures

Well, whoever would have thought the Local Food Feast would be so easy, and yet so difficult at the same time! So many rules, and yet no rules! There are so many different levels that you can attempt the bioregional challenge, there’s the harvesting and preparing every single item that goes into every single dish (the true slow food challenge), or the purchasing of locally made produce, or the purchasing of value-added manufactured local goods. Not to mention my own sneaky exit clause to the challenge, which is that since I find it criminal to let food go to waste (especially if it’s traveled so far to get here and had so many impacts along the way), I allow myself to eat the food in the fridge that would have gone bad if I didn’t polish it off! Anyway, I really like the openness of this challenge, the way you can attempt it on so many different levels, and that it has so many spin-off effects. For example, initiating arguments/discussion with friends and family! (some of my family members incorporated the idea into the Christmas lunch planning, with a theme of 'Seasonal Mediterranean', while other friends were simply outraged at the idea!)

However, by far the most satisfying element is harvesting and preparing food right from the start. There is no finer way of spending a day than sitting out under a tree on a sunny day, periodically checking yabbie nets and shootin’ the breeze. Or cracking almonds from their shells using two bricks and a back porch, and once again enjoying the warm weather and shootin’ the breeze. Or even the simple pleasures of freshly squeezed juice or grinding up seeds with pestle and mortar. It’s all about existing outside the wage slave economy, spending a few small hours of the day hunting and gathering food, and turning the rest of the day over to doing all the things you need to do to feel human!

So here’s a littl’ recipe from Day 1 of the Diet. It’s adapted from ‘The Food of Spain and Portugal’ by Elisabeth Luard, and is in the tradition of good honest simple peasant/shepherd’s food, although it’s fairly light. ‘Migas’ means cubes of stale bread, soaked and fried in aromatic pork dripping! Here we take a raincheck on the pig slaughtering.

SPANISH SPINACH MIGAS
(serves 2 as main meal)

1-2 big bunches of spinach (mine came via Pyramid Organics, Virginia) – shredded
6 mushrooms (again via Pyramid Organics via the Goodwood Goodfood Co-op) – sliced
4 cloves garlic (Wilson’s or backyard crop!) – minced
1 chilli (backyard crop) – sliced
6 tablespoons olive oil (mine was Minenko’s from Currency Creek)
Pinch of salt (harvested near Ceduna – a little out of the bioregion)
4 slices sourdough bread that’s 3-4 days old (mine was from Dough at the markets) - diced
2 eggs (I used Fleurieu Peninsula eggs)
Dried thyme or oregano (backyard crop)

*Sprinkle diced bread in a little salted water to revive, leave it for a few hours or overnight.
*Steam the shredded spinach in a lidded saucepan in a small amount of salted water, about 5 minutes. Drain and set aside.
*Heat half the oil in pan, cook the garlic and chilli until the garlic has gilded. Add the thyme, mushies and bread – stir until lightly fried. Remove to a bowl.
*Heat the other half of the oil, fry the steamed spinach for several minutes until heated through. *Add mushroom migas mix and combine (make sure it’s heated through).
*Serve warm with a fried egg on top!

So congratulations to everyone who’s been taking the challenge in whatever way they can, I have been far from purist (I still allow myself one cup a day of tea or coffee, for example!), but I already feel I have learnt a great deal about what is local and where to get it from, which will alter my eating habits for the immediate future. Some of the things on the cards for the next few days include making pasta from eggs and flour, visiting a fish market, and figuring out how to grind and roast some wattle seeds we seem to have a tin of! xx

Moments of gnocchi

Adelaide Plains Apricot Pie

The local Christmas went off without a hitch in my household, with family members variously delighted and inspired by the challenge of sourcing all the food from within a defined local area. One of the highlights of the day was also the simplest dish: Apricot & Nectarine Pie.

Ingredients

A couple of handfuls of apricots (these ones were sourced from the inner southern suburbs through the Urban Orchard)
3 or 4 nectarines (plucked fresh from a tree in my backyard)
honey (harvested in Aldinga, bought at the Adelaide Showgrounds Farmers Market)
whole wheat flour (grown and milled by Four Leaf, Tarlee; bought at Wilson's Organics)
olive oil (from Willunga, bought at the Adelaide Showgrounds Farmers Market)
almonds (grown by Willunga Almonds, bought at the Showgrounds Farmers Market)
water (piped from the Murray to you, or from your rainwater tank)
sheep's yogurt (the honey flavoured one from Kangaroo Island is particularly delectable)

Method
1. Chop apricots and place in a saucepan. With a little water and a couple of spoonfuls of honey (to taste), stew until they soften and begin to form a syrup paste. Remove from saucepan and put aside.
2. Combine 150 - 200g of flour with 1/4 cup of water and add a touch of olive oil. Mix using your hands, gradually adding olive oil until the bulk of the mixture clumps together, while still remaining dry and a little crumbly. Cover and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
3. Meanwhile, slice your nectarines into thin slivers, add to a new saucepan and semi-stew to ensure they retain their shape, with a little water and honey to taste.
4. You might want to turn on your oven now - the oven I use is temperamental and not very efficient, so I put it up to 200 degrees.
4. Remove pastry from fridge and roll out with a little flour. Place rolled pastry into a baking dish, trimming the edges as necessary. Chill further if you like.
5. Place oven-proof weights (like a ceramic lid or plate) on the pastry base to ensure it stays flat, then place in the oven and bake blind from 20 minutes, or until dry and crispy. If you like, you could also take it out 15-20 minutes, brush on the white of one egg, and place it back in the oven for another 5 minutes or so if you want to seal the base in preparation for a particularly sloppy filling.
6. Pour stewed apricots into the base, and arrange semi-stewed nectarines on surface in an appropriately decorative pattern. Scatter almonds on surface for further aesthetic delight.
7. Bake the whole thing for 20-30 minutes, and serve with the Kangaroo Island sheep's yoghurt. 8. Victory!

Gnocchi is now a swear word

The last chore we set ourselves yesterday was to make a batch of gnocchi. I haven't been a big fan of this carb rich food much in my life so far. It will never be tried again.

You wouldn't think it would be too hard to make; boil potatoes, remove the skin and mash and mix with flour. Perhaps it may have turned out better if we'd done it this way on our first attempt at making the stuff... but no, let's make stuffed stuff. Lets also add some pumpkin for good measure. And lets made double the batch for good measure, that way we won't need to make it again for a while.

We never set a stop watch to see how much of our lives went into the project. We guess about 3 hours prep and an hour cleaning up. Cleaning up after making hard, heavy revolting little chunks of dough is like watching someone else kiss the girl you've had a crush on for ages.

We've done a lot of cleaning up over the last couple of days. That's the thing about this challenge, when you can't trust others to provide you with food from the area, you've got to do the hard work yourselves. Cleaning up tonight wasn't so bad. The pasta maker we christened tonight works like a charm. It is a bit messy and we will have to figure out the best method of "up sizing" the batch quantity so it's worth making such a mess.

Something else we noticed is how tired we both were. It felt like Christmas afternoon siesta time all afternoon.

And chocolate smells really good when you aren't allowed to taste it.

Merry Xmas

S&K

What's local

Before I arrived in the Solomon islands I was aware my knowledge of the local foods was not great. It was (and still is) my intention to eat a locally derived christmas dinner, but given my pigeon is still in its infancy I was concerned at how I would know what had been locally produced. I need not have worried.

The Solomons seem to be a classic example of almost all the problems that plague Pacific nations. The first is political instability. Most of us would be aware of what is now seen as the imperialist attitude that saw so many indigenous people denied their traditional spirituality. Colonial powers felt, for various reasons, a need to demonise and eradicate traditional beliefs and practices and replace them with christianity. Today this practice is viewed by many as the arrogant, politically motivated tactic I believe it was (although parts of Africa are still the domain of the zealous evangelist). The longer I am in Honiara the more I wonder if imposing a western system of government on this country wasn't a political version of the same practice. Just as traditional spirituality crept into the christianity practiced by indigenous people, Wantok can not be excluded from Solomons governement. Wantok is the traditional consideration and favourable treatment given to your relatives and community members. When overlaid on a western government it is usually viewed by outsiders as bribery and corruption.

Another imposition that the Solomons suffer, like many Pacific nations, is a wide variety of imported food. I've written a post earlier about rice in particular. Many other foods imported from asia, invariably either very sugary or salty are also widely available. These massively processed foods attract young easilly influenced palates in a way locally grown produce never could.

The other big impediment that the Solomon Islands suffer can best be described by the term ironically coined for Australia - the tyranny of distance. For various reasons, some of them just mentioned, tourism and the regular trade it brings has largely eluded the Solomons. Compared to its neighbours, Fiji and Vanuatu, flights to Honiara are often four times as expensive. This has also resulted in expensive freight costs which are pssed on to the consumer. (Perhaps these are soem of the few that already pay a propper carbon tax?)

So we come back to my original question - how can I tell if it's local? The answer was actually remarkably simple. If the food is minimally processed (ie the husk has been removed from the coconut or the taro has been dug up) it's local. If it comes in an outrageously bright, shiny plastic packet and costs a similarly outrageous amount - even a box of wheetbix would cost the average person a day and a half's wage - its come a long way.
A freighter moored just of the coast seen from the Honiara town market

Cooking while drinking our wine is fun.

Home made tomato sauce is simmering on the stove. Pesto is in the fridge, mayonnaise recipe is open on another webpage.
Local food week is coming tomorrow. Coffee today and chocolate tonight will have to see me through.... they don't come from the Adelaide hills and plains like the other $150 worth of stuff we purchased this morning from the Adelaide Showgrounds Farmers Markets.

It was great going to the markets with Kelly's aunty and chewing the rind so to speak about local food after loading up. It was her first time to these markets and I'm sure they'll be semi-regular now. I forgot to get my bush tucker icecream this week come to think of it.

Thank the Deity that we have local wine as we'd have nothing else to drink other than water, milk or fruit juice. Does anyone else have a caffiene fix hot drink solution? The Moroccon Mint we bought this morning is only going to be good for about 3 cups before it's decimated.

Any one got some good home cropping going on? We have 10 green tomatos, 1 pod of purple climbing and about 3 Madagaskar bean pods, 15 rocket leaves, lots of parsley and frilly lettuce seed, and 1/2" -6" high seedlings at home and in our Green St plot. Tomorrow morning we'll be popping into my mums and raiding her apricot tree, tomato and strawberry plants.

Hope to read some more blogs soon.

Yabbying in the hills: taking responsibility for consumption

When I was little, there was an annual tradition with my family’s church to head up to the Riverland over the Easter long weekend. Church members from across the country would descend in their thousands on an already denuded cattle property near Waikerie, pitching tents and parking caravans on every available patch of ground. Seething with kids from the suburbs, their parents exhausted from the four hour drive and the baking heat, the long weekend would turn that patch of ground beside the Murray into a dustbowl, with everything flammable set on fire and every surviving patch of empty ground turned into a sporting field.

One of the more contemplative activities for unsupervised youths was to go shrimping. We’d get a tin, bang some holes in the base, and a couple in the top to thread a wire handle through to make a contraption like a billy-can with holes in the bottom. We’d thread bait onto wire looped through the holes and then, attaching some string to the handle, it would be tethered to a fallen log or tree root in the shallows. Soap was our main bait, perhaps because of a lack of anything else, but a fish head would work wonders if we could get one.

Dedicated shrimpers could haul in dozens of freshwater shrimp - translucent little creatures about 5 centimetres long that would skitter around the inside of the tin – and if they were lucky, a yabby or two, which were larger, darker and had a pair of claws that were a real threat. I remember then that there was a real disconnect between catching and eating these creatures, which I think indicates a broader lack of realisation about where our food came from. While most of these suburban kids would go back to their tents that evening and tuck into sausages squeezed out of some distant slaughterhouse, I remember that when I once suggested that we could cook and eat one of the yabbies (rather than leave them in a bucket and forget about them), my suggestion was met first with disbelief, then revulsion, and my shrimping pals melted away.


In keeping with the broader theme of reconnection with the land and people that produce our food, as an omnivore, this local eating challenge also pushes me towards taking real responsibility for what I consume. With this in mind, Sophie and I set off on our journey of reconnecting with our food by yabbying. A friend has a dam that apparently seethes with them, and as the water level has declined over summer, the extent of their tunnelling into the dam walls has been revealed. Yabbies are notorious for digging through the clay layer that seals the dam in search of groundwater, with some yabbies having been found up to 7 metres underground.


We built three traps in the classic style, a container with holes in the base, a handle and a wire for bait threaded into the bottom: in this case, an olive oil tin, a yogurt container and half a plastic milk bottle. Our fourth trap was a five dollar “opera” net from an army disposals shop. For bait, we picked up a couple of fish heads from a seafood seller at the markets. We baited up the traps, tethered them to branches on the shore, tossed them into the murky water and waited. While Luka, the resident dog leaped in the water and tangled herself in the ropes, we sat in the warm sun and chatted about the ethics of eating meat.

Meat-eating is a contentious and deeply personal topic. I am horrified at the industrialisation of our food system and nowhere more than the atrocity of industrial livestock rearing and slaughter. While I’m revolted by the horrors of industrialised food, I’m not completely convinced that meat alone is the problem with attaining sustainability.

I think humans function best when they are nested within an ecosystem, which presents a challenge for us, as Judith Plant says,

“remembering and reclaiming the ways of our species where people and place are delicately interwoven in a web of life – human community finding its particular place within the living and dying that marks the interdependence of life in an integrated ecosystem”.

The best way for us to live with sensitivity and consciousness of the world that sustains us is to live in relationship with the organisms we share our home with. As indigenous cultures across the world suggest (and indigenous cultures may be the only working models of true sustainability we have) part of a relationship with the world might be the relationship of predator and prey. In this context, the act of hunting is not necessary one of domination and conquest, but can be an intricate and deeply respectful play of the cycles and exchange that define life within an ecosystem.

I’m a long way from reaching this kind of immersion in the life of the planet, but an important first step – both to test these grand theories as well as to confront the reality of eating meat – is take responsibility for my own consumption.


Every twenty minutes or so, we’d haul up the traps to find a handful of yabbies nibbling away at the bait, we’d throw back the little ones and carefully we’d pick up the big ones (holding them just on the crease behind their eyes and out of reach of their claws) and put them aside in an esky full of water in the shade. Yabbies colours can vary according to their habitat, and despite the murkiness of the dam, some emerged a deep, almost black, blue while others were tan, with shades of pale blue and patches of brilliant red. After a few hours, we had fifteen yabbies of good size, and had thrown back the same number again. The monster of the day was a dark-shelled giant, who opted to squeeze his full sixteen centimetre body into the halved milk bottle and wait, claws folded. Free roaming chickens watched curiously, from a safe distance.

HOW TO COOK YABBIES:
1. We loaded the eskies into the car, and wound our way back to the city, past cherry and apple orchards netted up against the birds.
2. When we were home, we placed them into containers and straight into the freezer, while putting on a pot to boil. At temperatures of under 16 degrees, yabby metabolism slows, gradually slipping into hibernation.
3. After 25 minutes in the freezer, they’re into the pot, boiled for a few minutes until they're completely red. They can be shelled and eaten immediately, or frozen for later eating.

Turkey talkin times

Hi Joel.
We're spreading the word. Takin' nut roast instead of turkey roast to Xmas dinners. Kelly's on the blower talkin' up the challenge.
Lookin' at getting a pasta maker so we can use local flour and eggs to create a staple base for a few meals in the week. Your welcome to come over and have some and borrow it.
See ya for local pizza after Xmas or maybe at the famous Xmas night party at Thebarton guitar shop.
Sheldon

Wrestling with rice

All pacific nations rely heavily on carbohydrate in their diets. Plants such as cassava, breadfruit and yam grow readily and are farmed extensively in small gardens. The high rainfall and warm climate mean that self sufficiency in these crops is relatively easy. Unlike many of their neighbours, the Solomon Islands have largely turned from these indigenous crops to an exotic source of carbohydrate – rice.



Opinions vary as to why this has occurred. During the Second World War there were large numbers of Japanese troops occupying many of the islands and this was probably the Solomon’s first exposure to the new food. Shortly after the Japanese occupation bloody fighting resulted in even larger numbers of American troops occupying the islands. Interestingly they too were eating rice as it was a compact, long lasting source of energy. Regardless of the initial cause, the Solomons largely turned away from their traditional foods and embraced rice as a staple.
Recently the cost of rice has risen dramatically. Almost weekly increases have seen the cost of a 20kg bag jump from $75 SBD (Solomons Dollars) in 2003 to $120 SBD today. As a reference the average wage is about $32 SBD a day.



Rice has not just been adopted by the urban population either. Outlying islands, of which there are many, also rely heavily on the imported food. Because of high fuel costs and limited, primitive transport a 20 kg bad of rice can cost these people (who earn much less) as much as $170 SBD. Increasingly high food costs have caused even more migration from outlying islands to the capital, a source of much recent ethnic tension.



Such increases have resulted in divided attitudes regarding a solution. Many young people, tired of what they see as the destructive influence of western trade, would like to see the price rise as a motivator to return to self sufficiency. One young cassava seller in the market told me



“I think it is a good thing that prices of rice is increasing as most of us residing in Honiara are too dependant on rice, therefore we never make our own gardens or eat other local produces. Maybe this will make people think and stop relying on rice too much and start considering other food crops.”



Government campaigns promoting national pride have encouraged this attitude which is ironic because the government has quite a different solution in mind. Rather than encourage a return to native crops, the experience of some African nations is being used as an example from which they might learn. Rice was initially farmed in Uganda with poor results until a strain known as Nerica was developed. This suited the local environment and produced much greater yields.
Government corruption (which is rife) means that any profit making industry will be encouraged in favour of self sufficiency. The government wants to engage private firms to start farming rice locally. While this would remove much of the importation costs and potentially lower retail prices it seems inevitable that it will be yet another target for corrupt government practices.

Boys delivering rice with typical seriousness