I had hoped to upload this one last week as I had some recipes directly relating to what I did with the end of my Mixed Medium box – but I was thwarted by  the full moon – but I’m sure the people who know me are truly tired of me blaming everything on the full moon while maintaining my own personal immunity (moon in Aquarius – SHAZAAM!).  So here is a recipe I made on New Years Day, but is even more relevant now:

Roasted grapes and beetroot salad with pistachio encrusted chevre

It was hot, hot, hot in Melbourne and because my sweet little daughter won’t let us go to things like Peat’s Ridge Festival on account of her age (4 months at the time), we opted to sit in my 4 year-old’s backyard pool, douse unsuspecting passer’s by with water and dine al fresco on our aging Italian patio.  This was the day that my son started eating lettuce leaves with gusto – he grabbed a piece of lettuce, took a bite and exclaimed, “So sweet!  I love lettuce!”  Quite a pleasant surprise for me since I didn’t touch a vegetable until I was 30. Incidentally, I blame the boy’s love of lettuce on the fresh, seasonal, organic produce he gets each week.  He quite often eschews restaurant food and proclaims that the food at home tastes better.  I seem to have cooked myself into a corner….

In the end, anyone who is game can realise the beauty of roasting grapes -  and why not roll some of our very own Meredith chevre in pistachios to create a truly marvellous easy meal.  This is heavily adapted from The New Vegetarian cookbook by a wonderful cook, Robin Asbell in California, who calls this a winter salad, but doesn’t really seem to cook seasonally.  They probably have different seasons in California…..

The other night, just as I was about to go to bed, I found my lovely and beautiful naturopath partner sitting at the kitchen table peeling, deseeding and chopping the tomatoes from our box and garden in order to make a summer tomato sauce.

As it was 4 hours past her bedtime and only 2 hours past mine (I’m not breastfeeding anyone – what do I need to sleep for?) we decided I would finish it off.  2 hours later, we had a beautiful summer tomato sauce which we put into 2 pizzas the next day.

Summer Tomato Sauce

As I was waiting for the sauce to cook – I also ended up making two different batches of muffins and a stir fry….I know, crazy, but I’m considering it a personal day of transcendence…I will no longer purchase any poor excuse for a muffin, stir fry or pizza when I know I can do better at home.  Let’s start a revolution!

CERES have partnered with Urban Reforestation and will be delivering to their shop in the Docklands each Tuesday between 3.30pm and 5.30pm.  Join today, order and pick up your box of organic, locally sourced fruit and veg next Tuesday!  Join here..

Sow Stalls, legal in Australia.

Recently I was chatting to a bunch of seemingly well informed people about Food Inc the movie. One of the comments made was that the film was about industrial agricultural in the USA, so wasn’t ‘relevant’ to Australians. It’s interesting to see how very little we actually know about where our food comes from, how it’s produced and how we are willing to believe that it ‘couldn’t happen here’.  The truth is often obscured because it’s ugly and bad for business.

Take Sow Stalls for instance. Until 20 minutes ago I wasn’t familiar with the term, reading that they are being phased-out in Tasmania brought it to my attention.  A quick search in Google returned 254,000 results and after reading a report by the RSPCA in Victoria and others, I can see that this is an extremely barbaric practice – essentially battery farming for pigs – that should be banned immediately (as it has been in the UK and soon the rest of Europe).

The point here is that sadly, as consumers we are intentionally kept in the dark.  Should we have the right to know how our food is being produced? Would it make a difference if we did? I think that if we were better informed it would make a huge difference in what we buy and what we feed our families. I expect that like myself, most people would be horrified to know that sow stalls are a perfectly legal and ‘normal’ practice here in Australia and if they did know the facts they would give more consideration to what meat they purchase (or at least make an informed choice one way or the other).

I am no vegetarian, but it seems to me that if we are going to eat our animal friends then we should at least provide them with a natural, stress-free habitat, making sure they are healthy and well looked after.  As Joel Salatin points out in Food Inc. “A culture that just uses a pig as a pile of protoplasmic inanimate structure, to be manipulated by whatever creative design the human can foist on that critter, will probably view individuals within its community, and other cultures in the community of nations, with the same type of disdain and disrespect and controlling type mentalities.”

Unfortunately, there are many problems with intensive meat production and animal welfare is just one of them (check out the environmental cost here).  However, we can make a difference by considering what we choose to buy and who from. Ask your butcher where they source their meat, how the animals were raised, always insist on organic, free range meat and be happy to wear the extra cost.

DF

Happy pig doing what pigs like to do.

Along the Merri creek bike path, less then 10kms from the city center you will stumble across an urban jewel, a 150-year-old productive market garden. A market garden is a place where fruit and vegetables are grown to sell to the local community. The Merri Creek Market Garden was once farmed by a local Italian, Joe Garita, who at 65 decided to retire from the 2.5-acre market garden and offer his lease on the garden to CERES. Joe continues to act as a mentor to CERES farmers, a new generation of urban farmers. (more…)

Once were farmers
Over the past 12,000 years, the age of agriculture, most of us were farmers.  We were wedded to the land that fed us.  The foods we grew defined who we were; people of wheat or corn or rice.   The seasons dictated our diets, the harvests our festivals.  Then less than a hundred years ago in a burst of incredible oil-fuelled ingenuity humanity managed to do what 600 starvation weary generations of farmers have dreamt of – created a cheap, abundant food supply grown by a handful of producers freeing the rest of us to pursue our dreams in the cities and towns. In Australia in 1900 1 in 7 of us were farmers, today only 1 in 33 grow the food we eat. (more…)