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.