planting out the tomatoes

The beds are made and the weather is looking fine so, even though we're one week before the magical Show Day cutoff (for all you non-Tasmanians, it is traditional to plant out tomatoes after the Royal Hobart show day, in the third week of October, as this roughly corresponds to the last frosts), we decided to take a minor gamble and plant out half of our seedlings and keep the other half as backups in pots in the poly cloche.


To minimise our risk even further, we covered each seedling with a cut-off 2 litre plastic juice bottle, to be removed when we're feeling extra brave given that we are prone to frosts sitting in a cool air drainage as we are.



You can also see that we use one dripper per plant and this drips into a shallow well in the soil.
It's hard to see from the picture but there are 23 plants of various heirloom variety in this row.

1 week later we removed the plastic bottles because of good weather and the plants were hitting the rooves. One more week later and we planted out the remaining seedlings - a further 24 plants. You might think this is a lot of tomatoes but it's not because we bottle (this is the sauce I used in the mushroom pasta dish), freeze and dry enough tomatoes so that we never need to buy any tomato products. Our stuff tastes much better than that Italian stuff and it's only travelled about 30 metres to the kitchen! This year we might sell any excess locally.

They're all growing rapidly so I'll need to start trellising them soon.

Mushrooms

We love to eat mushrooms. When we lived in the US, we sometimes went picking wild mushrooms - all the delicious ones that cost lots of money in Europe like morels, chanterelles (girolles) and porcini. After moving to Tassie, the wild mushroom choice became limited. We saw morels on Mt Wellington once and we've picked and eaten the typical field mushrooms as well as "slippery jacks".
Briony built a mushroom box out of old floorboards and filled it with some spent mushroom compost. If we're lucky, we get one or two flushes of mushrooms, usually huge ones, like these



Often we make a simple pasta dish with our bottled tomatoes (more on this in a different post) reduced to a thick sauce served over a homemade egg pasta that the Italians traditionally cut over a box laced with wires called a chitarra (guitar). We cut the pasta in our pasta machine. I was thinking that the mushrooms fried in olive oil tossed into the sauce at the last minute would make a delicious addition. They did.

seedlings and the beds

Back in mid August we began to germinate and raise seedlings for our summer garden. The unreliable length and strength of our Tasmanian summers means that we need to extend the season by starting frost sensitive seedlings indoors or under plastic cloches. We nurture these babies for about 6-8 weeks, potting them up as they grow, making sure that they do not get stressed until November when it is safe to plant them out. Tomatoes account for about half of all of these seedlings with about 8 varieties represented; Stupice for the earliest producers; Mamma Mia and Costoluto for high production for saucing; and a bunch of other heirloom varieties for taste sensations. Other seedlings started in this manner include eggplants (Ping Tung), chillis, capsicums, zucchinis, pumpkins, rockmelons and cucumbers.



We also have two garden beds with low plastic hothouse structures, which we use for establishing plants before November. We have bush beans, lettuce, coriander, dill and parsley coming along in these.

Two weeks after rotary hoeing the garden area, Stan rehoed and used the furrowing attachment to create paths and, not incidentally, our raised beds.


This is where all of the seedlings will go as well as a whole bunch of other stuff that we sow directly. Watch this dirt!

pizza

Some years ago, we built an adobe oven so that we could make good bread, pizza and other things that cook in wood-fired ovens. It's pretty hard to get a decent pizza in Tasmania and even in Australia. Most of the doughs have all sorts of weird conditioners, the bases too thick and the cheese cheddary. Then to top it all off there are too many toppings.
It's sad because it is not hard to make a good, simple, traditional pizza.
The dough should only have flour, water, salt and yeast. To have pizzas ready for dinner, make a batter of flour, water and yeast as early in the morning as possible. Cover and leave to ferment until just before you light your oven. For us, this is 3 hours before we cook the first pizza. By this time, the batter should be bubbly and yeasty smelling. This is where all the flavour comes from.
Add quite a bit of salt and enough flour to turn it into a pliable dough.


Knead for 15 minutes and then oil the ball of dough and place it back in the bowl, covered, until the fire is ready.
We make a simple sauce with our bottled, pureed tomatoes. Just reduce the sauce with a little salt and some oregano added. The cheese is a bit of an issue. It's almost impossible to get real bufalo mozzarella in Australia and if I could get it, I would just gobble it up. We use a cheese variously called cappriciosa or fior de latte. It's really good on pizza and similar to a mozzarella.
Briony is our champion dough puller. She pulls a beautiful thin base which we top with some tomato, a bit of cheese grated (even though it should really just be ripped apart) and then one or two toppings.


It takes about 2 minutes to cook in a hot oven ..............


................and it's difficult to wait for long enough so that the roof of your mouth doesn't burn.

casareccia

It's that lean time of the year. New plantings are going in and lettuces are getting close to being ready but in the garden there's only kale, cime di rapa (a leafy brassica), silverbeet, leeks, celery and a bit of parsley.
A nice pasta dish can be made with cime di rapa and/or kale. This could be made with orechiette (little ears) or casareccia, which although means "home-made" in Italian, usually isn't.
To make casareccia, make a stiff but just pliable dough with 4 cups durum wheat flour (we are currently using some Australian grown and milled stuff called Bellata gold which is great) and about 1 1/4 cups of water and 1/2 tsp salt, knead it well and let it rest in a plastic bag. Resting relaxes the gluten and allows the pasta to be worked without springing back.
Roll the dough into sausages about 2cm in diameter. On a lightly floured cutting board use a sharp, small knife to cut off a disc about 3mm thick then use the flat of the blade and "smear" the dough away from you with the sharp edge of the blade pointing towards the sausage of dough.


Because of the strength of the dough, it won't actually smear but will roll itself into a loose, folded spiral that emerges magically from the blade.

To make the "sauce", heat 1/4 cup of good olive oil (we use extra virgin Tasmanian made by Rocky Caccavo at Campania), add 2 anchovies and allow them to dissolve in the oil then add two diced onions and fry until transparent. Add 1/2 cup of pinenuts and allow them to colour a little before adding 5 cloves of chopped garlic and about 1 dozen chopped cherry tomatoes (our frozen ones from last summer). Once the tomatoes soften add 3 packed cups of chopped cime di rapa or kale or both. Mix in, put the lid on and allow the greens to wilt briefly.
After cooking the pasta in plenty of salted, boiling water, drain and toss with the sauce and a generous extra amount of olive oil and salt to taste. Serve with grated cheese, chilli and pepper.

confit duck legs

We raise muscovy ducks for meat. They're fabulously bred because they're calm and quiet. They have a voracious appetite for snails, slugs, waste fruit and greenery (especially brassica).


About one month ago, we killed our third batch of ducks - the autumn hatchlings. Killing 7 in one day is a big undertaking psychologically and physically but once we get into that frame of mind it's worth staying there and getting the job done.
We hardly ever eat the ducks whole because the breasts require much less cooking that the rest. So, breasts, legs, wings and backs are separated and frozen.
Recently I made this dish of rare and crispy skinned duck breast, sausage made from the leg meat, sugarloaf cabbage braised in homemade hard apple cider and crispy parsnip cake.


One thing we like doing with the legs is to make confit. I have twice followed this recipe and it works really well.


Here's a meal made with confit duck leg, panfried duck livers, crispy potatoes, baked baby fennels and braised savoy cabbage. Yum!


The other day, I melted the fat and pulled out 3 confit legs which I then pan fried until the skin was crispy. I pulled the meat - it was deliciously tender - off the bones and served it with silverbeet (swiss chard) and leeks wilted with a little of the confit fat then dressed with a few drops of apple cider vinegar and a big dollop of creamy mashed Kennebec potatoes. Yum!