Girragirra Green Living

If you are interested in organic gardening, sustainable architecture, sourdough bread, wood fired baking and/or good living - please read today’s post. It’s one of my favourite so far on the blog and I am so proud to bring you all the story of Wendy and Kim Muffet and Girragirra Green Living.

Just five minutes out of the Central Western NSW town of Forbes, Wendy and Kim have created a completely sustainable home, retreat and garden completely in keeping with the Wiradjuri, meaning of their property’s name; roughly translated, Girragirra means "be well, be happy, be merry."

The 50-acre organic farm incorporates a food garden, self-contained luxury accommodation, a home for Wendy and Kim, their beloved wood-fired oven and a billabong of crystal clear water that doubles as the family’s swimming pool during Forbes’ hot summers.

The building was designed by award-winning sustainability architect Tone Wheeler and is pretty much exactly the kind of house I’d love to live in one day. The design is intuitive, inspiring, completely energy efficient and the interior spaces are a delight to be in. Sigh. 

In addition to the retreat that they manage, Wendy and Kim have also discovered a bit of a love affair with baking bread and cooking in their wood fired oven. Please read the below e-interview for with them more on how and why the Muffat’s like this and be inspired, like I am, to work towards doing the same. And because Wendy is such a generous, clever cook, she’s also given us her recipe for roasted tomato and garlic jam (see below) which we had for lunch on sourdough with goat’s cheese on the day I visited. The perfect way to use up all those early Autumn tomatoes hanging around at the moment.

Can you give me an introduction to Girragirra Retreat? What are you working towards here?

The Retreat is part of an evolving business called Girragirra Green Living. We are working towards a community based, truly sustainable, passion-driven lifestyle centered on our just completed sustainable house, evolving food garden and regenerating 50-acre river farm. The Retreat, a luxury two bedroom self contained apartment  overlooking a billabong of the Lachlan River enables guests to experience the ease and comfort of living in a house built around sustainable principles and also the joy of "growing your own" if they are so inclined - or just to chill out in a beautiful space after a day spent travelling or working in the amazing central west of NSW

How long have you been here?

We purchased Girragirra in 2009 and began working on both the land health and designing the house soon after. We moved into the not quite finished house on Christmas eve 2012 - just because! Our focus then moved to completing the Retreat which we opened 12 months ago and beginning the garden, like every garden, a forever project

Can you describe the property and the house? Tell us about it's eco-values?

Girragirra the property, is a pretty little organic accredited river farm holistically managed to deliver a beautiful, profitable, productive and biodiverse landscape. 

Tone Wheeler - a multi award winning architect with a passion for sustainability designed the house and retreat to last a very long time, delivering maximum comfort, low maintenance and minimal environmental impact. Solar passive design principles ensure the house is naturally warm in winter and cool in summer. A 10KW solar array produces way more energy than we use and solar hydronic hot water / underfloor heating is a big energy saver. Cross flow ventilation, loads of insulation and double glazing deliver year 'round thermal comfort. A "big lid" collects around 200,000L of pure rain water for our tanks making the house and retreat totally self-sufficient for water. All black and grey water is treated and recycled onsite.

A massive old River Red Gum found felled nearby was milled onsite by our friend Justin and Kim, and gives the house heart as beautiful doors, tables, bench tops, window sills and stools. The iron cladding came off an old factory - screw holes and all! (our architect reckons it looks like a young house with acne :). Very old timbers we salvaged from derelict local woolsheds form the carport screens, courtyard doors and luggage racks. Paints and other surface finishes were chosen for sustainable production methods and non toxic properties as well as good looks. Keeping it local with Bernie the builder, Justin the cabinet maker, our other fabulous tradies and building material suppliers was important. Rubbish from the build was recycled - much of it onsite.

The garden surrounding the retreat was designed on permaculture principles and is delivering a health giving, beautiful, food forest and garden for our family, friends and guests to enjoy as it grows and develops.

Above photo shows part of a work by  artist Rosie Wingrove Johnston.

What were you and Kim doing before moving to Forbes? 

Kim and I are Ag Science graduates and fourth generation farmers. Before moving to Girragirra which is only 4km from the Forbes CBD we had the privilege of farming 1800 hectares 60 kilometres south west of Forbes.

And why this particular area? Why Forbes?

With no kids coming home to the farm, we took an opportunity to sell our broad acre property.  We love this western country and have deep roots in the Forbes community so really never considered moving elsewhere. We had long planned to buy a small parcel of land on the Lachlan close to town when the time came to scale back and are thriving on the closer connections to community and friends that has eventuated. Our kids - both Sydney based, head west with their partners and friends every chance they get. It's a beautiful place for them to chill out and reconnect with the land and community.

Your obvious commitment to creating a sustainable food garden is impressive, what inspired you to go down this path?

We've always been gardeners and believe gardens with food as the focus can be just as beautiful and inspiring as gardening with ornamentals only. The joy of gardening and creating something beautiful aside, the health benefits of absolutely fresh, organically grown food are well known … and hey, we don't need to go to the gym, a couple of hours weeding and mulching is as good as any work out! We love it when our guests wander around and pick something for dinner from the garden and it's heart warming to see the way kids just naturally engage, racing around playing hide and seek and get soooooo excited about eating whatever they have picked - especially strawberries! We believe that connection to whole food and where it comes from has been lost to a generation or two and hope in some small way that the garden may reignite a passion for growing even a little bit of food, surely a primal instinct,  in some of our guests.

Can you tell us about the wood fired oven? Did you build it yourselves?

Once again it's a story of family and community! We had one on our wish list and the excitement of our chef son Dougal coming home for a month and cooking for his home community meant we fast tracked it!

We bought the oven bit as a kit, used left over materials from the build to make the base and worked alongside a local brickie who did the tricky stuff to get the job done.

What advice would you give to readers wanting to build their own?

I think it depends on what they want to do with it, how ‘handy’ they are and funds available. There are all sorts of options out there - Google will dazzle you with choice, ranging from totally DYI supported by workshops (think low cost, low tech, hands on, great for family pizza nights and a bit of baking) through to companies who will arrive on your doorstep and construct an oven that you would let you run a hatted restaurant!

We wanted an oven that would perform somewhere in the middle of those two extremes and was a fit with our wildly enthusiastic but somewhat limited skill set.

What are some of the most memorable meals you've cooked from the garden and in the oven?

Everything we cook in the wood fired oven is tastier - don't know why that's so!

I think maybe the second long lunch Douglas cooked for us here wins the prize as the most memorable. We had about forty people and the menu featured dishes made using local lamb; local truly free range pork; Girragirra eggs, pumpkin, eggplant, fennel, zucchini, tomatoes and herbs from the garden; local stone fruit and of course sourdough - all of which had a turn in the oven and as you know yourself, a goodly dose of love. The feedback from that day has been so heartwarming.

Now, can you tell us a bit about the bread? How did you get started in baking? How did you learn the art of sourdough!?

I began baking sourdough maybe 3 or 4 years ago. We had long wanted to be able to buy and eat more nourishing bread and none was available locally. Our son worked at Sydney restaurant Berta for some time, one Easter he bought their 'starter' home for safe keeping and it was love at first sight! Soon 'Berty', Girragirra's starter was born, and with a lot of patient mentoring on Dougal's part I learnt to bake OK sourdough in our then tiny, often cantankerous little oven.

The wood fired oven changed all that and over the month he was home with us Dougal and Kim together mastered the oven - think lots of getting up at ungodly hours mucking about with the fire and the coals, a bit like bringing home a newborn! Kim now has that mastered although it will be a moving target with the onset of colder weather.

Dougal proved to be quite a stern taskmaster with his Mum, passing on his passion and skillset in the gentle art of baking beautiful, artisanal sourdough which I just LOVE doing. Again an ever evolving process.

We now put a very limited supply into a local Café which is usually pre-sold before it hits the shelf.

What do you think are the key elements to baking a beautiful sourdough loaf?

Sounds corny but a passion for the art, the capacity to give the process the time and attention to detail it needs, organic flour (makes a big difference, not only in my experience but more validly Dougal's) and while it's definitely not essential - the wood fired oven makes a HUGE difference to the quality of the loaf. That said, there are shortcuts that mean everyone, even very busy people can bake good sourdough in their own kitchen if they would like to.

And can you also tell us about your food wraps, the beeswax wraps we saw in the solar dehydrator (below)?

We all know what bad news plastics - especially plastic bags are for our environment. The wraps mean that we can all cover food, wrap sambos etc without using plastic.

You can buy some really gorgeous ones  online or as you saw me doing, make your own by grating beeswax onto light weight cotton ( I used calico) and melting it in an oven or in our case the solar dehydrator. I now use them to cover the sourdough as it rests in the fridge overnight instead of covering the bannetons with plastic bags and I think the end result is better - the loaves don't "sweat"

Obviously you both work incredibly hard here, why? Can you describe the satisfaction you get from what you have/are creating here?

We believe that everyone needs a purpose to enable them to live a satisfying life.

After selling our farm we could have settled back and spent our time travelling or whatever but that held no appeal for us - at all. It's actually hard to describe how much pleasure /satisfaction we get from the ongoing business of creating, sharing, enjoying Girragirra Living with our family and community. I guess it boils down to that sense of purpose, a deepening connection with the ecosystems and community which support us and the life long learning that comes along with that? Superficially, it's also a very beautiful place to live!

And what about the retreat? What do you offer your guests here that is so unique to other country B&B's/boutique accommodation offerings?

At the least a luxurious, peaceful,  beautiful, self contained space to relax into after a day spent travelling or working. We pop a freshly baked loaf of sourdough on our guests doorstep every morning and supply our own delicious organic free range eggs PLUS housemade preserves and locally roasted coffee along side all the other bits and pieces you'd expect to find in a breakfast hamper.

Most of our guests tell us they wish they had more time to simply kick back on the couch and gaze out the huge picture windows at the antics of the wild life on the billabong or make pizza in the wood fired oven, wander through the food garden and pick and eat whatever it is they discover, to learn more about how the sustainable house works, what makes the permaculture food forest tick or how we manage the farm holistically…..

Because the Retreat is completely self-contained we are finding some guests are now using it as a base to travel out from to experience the western country and still have a bit of luxury to come home to.

What are you looking forward to most with the change of season, what's coming through in your garden that you're looking forward to cooking and sharing at your table?

Cooler weather, the beauty of the autumn foliage, shorter working days and the opportunity that gives for learning, plotting and planning :) and all of the delicious winter veggies like caulis, broccoli, brussell sprouts ( a personal favourite when roasted), winter greens, fruits from our baby fruit trees like quinces and blood oranges and lemons, making delicious curries and braises and slow roasts in the wood fired using the abundant fresh herbs and leaves from the curry plants and pomegranates, baking sourdough and maybe learning to bake a few other treats … the promise of Spring.

Wendy's slow roasted tomato and almond jam

This stuff is amazing with goat's cheese and nice sourdough but also good served with bacon and egg rolls, cheese plates, pretty much anywhere you'd use chutney! Makes about 4 cups.

1 kg slow roasted tomatoes (recipe follows)
250 g cherry tomatoes chopped (I've subbed sundried ones out of the dehydrator and that was probably nicer)
800g white sugar
grated rind 2 lemons
juice 1 1/2 lemons
70 g blanched flaked almonds (I've subbed chopped activated almonds out of the dehydrator here too - tastier and adds crunch)

Place all the ingredients into a large preserving pan and slowly dissolve the sugar over a low heat stirring occasionally. Bring to the boil and cook until setting point, about 20/30 minutes. Don't leave it too long between stirs as it will burn.

Stir in the almonds and remove from heat to cool for 10 minutes before spooning into warm sterilised jars to seal.

Slow roasted tomatoes

5kg roma tomatoes, quartered
Salt and pepper
1 cup olive oil
20 cloves garlic, peeled and cut in slithers
1 handful basil leaves

Preheat oven to 150C. Place tomatoes skin-side down on two large roasting trays. Pour over the olive oil and season well with sea salt and pepper. Sprinkle over the garlic and add the basil. Roast for 2-3 hours or until the liquid has reduced to a thick oily residue and you have some nice little singed bits on the tomato edges.

For more information about Girragirra Green Living and to organise a stay for yourself - you really should...please contact Wendy and Kim via their website. 

Farm Kitchen, March 2015

Last weekend's Farm Kitchen lunch was the reason we do these things - perfect Autumn weather, lots of tasty seasonal food, a happy bunch of people and plenty of Orange wine to complement all of the above.

We had the below menu (and please forgive my shocking hand-writing, I'd forgotten to do the blackboards and had to scribble them in a hurry as the first guests began to arrive) and our neighbours and friends Justin and Pip Jarrett came over for lunch too with some of their new See Saw Wines to share (their Pinot is my favourite, really delicious and a great price). Thanks as always to my clever friend Pip for coming along to help me cook on the day. We couldn't do it without you or your kitchen chat Pip. Thanks also to my mother-in-law Judith Hansen for letting me raid her amazing garden for foliage to decorate the tables.

Tim took everyone on a bit of a farm tour and then we sat down to a rather long lunch, some not rising from the table again until well into the evening, but that's another story.




And true to form, after the lunch kicked off, I was too busy plating up, clearing etc to take many photos. None were captured of the entree and just a handful thereafter! I did grab one of the main course though, it was a colourful, crunchy Autumnal affair and we were really happy with how it worked out. Recipe follows...

Chargrilled venison with Autumn slaw, quince chutney, spuds and elephant garlic aioli

For the slaw

This is a really beautiful Autumn side-dish and it's also great with slow-cooked pork or lamb and full of flavour and crunch. I use a mandolin to shave the cabbage, apples and fennel nice and finely but a sharp knife would also do the trick. This recipe serves 8 people. The quince chutney recipe can be found here.

1/2 red cabbage, finely shaved
1/2 white cabbage, finely shaved
3 Granny Smith apples, finely sliced
1 fennel bulb, finely sliced (keep the fronds and toss into the salad too)
2 cups rocket
1 bunch mint, leaves picked from stems
1 cup walnut kernels, roasted and roughly chopped
 For the dressing; 1/2 cup buttermilk, 3 tbsp olive oil, 2 tsp wholegrain mustard, Juice of one lemon and salt and pepper to taste.

Combine all ingredients in a large bowl and toss well. Whisk the dressing ingredients together then work through the salad with your fingers. I find this is a pretty 'thirsty' salad so you may need to add more buttermilk.

To cook the venison;

As always we believe that simpler is better with our tender meat, particularly with a prime cut like backstrap. So all we do is rub it with olive oil and season then cook for four minutes on each side on a hot barbecue before resting for 10 minutes under foil and slicing across the grain.

For the spuds

This was my friend and invaluable helper Pip's domain, she scrubbed and washed a mixture of Kipflers, Dutch creams and Kestrel potatoes then par-boiled them before tossing with rosemary and olive oil and roasting at 200 for an hour. Our spuds came freshly dug from Dougal Munro's farm.

For the elephant garlic aioli

Elephant garlic is a fairly new discovery for me and I thank Dougal Munro for the introduction. Dougal grows this variety and much more at his Springside farm and I'm currently working on a post about him which I hope will be ready to go next week. In the meantime, if you can get your hands on elephant garlic for this, please do! The bulbs are huge, as the name suggests and have a gorgeous, mellow flavour that is perfect here. Of course, any smaller (Australian-grown) garlic would be great here too. Makes 1 cup.

3 egg yolks
1/2 tsp sea salt
1 tsp Dijon mustard
1 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 head elephant garlic

Preheat oven to 180C. Rub the garlic with a little olive oil, wrap in foil then place in the oven for one hour. Meanwhile, lay a tea towel on a work surface and place a bowl on top (this will help stop it slipping around while you whisk). Place the yolks, salt and mustard in the bowl and whisk until well combined. Now add the oil in a steady stream, whisking all the time so the mixture thickens up as you go. If it splits, just stop adding oil and give it a really good whisk, things should come back together after a bit. Your arm might be sore but the results will be worth it!

Keep whisking until all the oil is incorporated then transfer to a jar and place this in the fridge while the garlic cooks. After an hour, slice the top off the bulb and squeeze the soft, almost caramelised garlic 'pulp' into a bowl. Let cool then mix into the mayonnaise base, season to taste and return to the fridge until needed.

The highlight of the day for me, apart of course, from our beautiful venison, was the below fig and ricotta tart. I get disproportionately excited when a new recipe works out exactly as I'd hoped and this was one of those times. 

Basically a pretty simple affair; a sweet shortcrust pastry shell blind baked then filled with home-made ricotta and topped with white and black figs then baked again (but not too much, I wanted the ricotta to still be slightly wobbly and silky soft). The result was a perfect combination of flavour and texture (if I don't say so myself).  Here's the recipe, below, and please note, you could swap the figs with any fresh or poached fruit you think might work. 

We served these tarts with a dollop of Little Big Dairy cream (incredible stuff) and a sprinkling of sweet dukkah. 

Fig and ricotta tarts

Makes 2 tarts

1 quantity shortcrust pastry (here's my recipe)

2 cups homemade ricotta (of course you can use store bought ricotta and it will still be a beautiful tart, I just find the homemade version to be looser and more delicious, and truly it's easy to make).

3 free range eggs

1 tsp vanilla paste

3 tbsp caster sugar

Green and black figs, thinly sliced 

Roll out half of the pastry until about 4mm thick then drape over a loose-bottomed tart shell or pie tin. Press into the base and edges and trim. Repeat with the other half of the pastry then place the shells in the fridge to rest for half an hour.

Preheat the oven to 180C. Prick the base of each tart shell with a fork then line with baking paper and fill with baking weights, rice, lentils or similar. Bake for 10 minutes then remove paper and weights and bake for another 10 minutes or until the pastry is turning a light golden colour and looking nice and dry. 

Meanwhile, whisk the ricotta, eggs, vanilla and sugar together until well combined - do this by hand not with an electric mixer as it will make the mixture too dense. Divide among both the blind-baked tart shells then top with sliced figs.

Return tarts to the oven for a further 20 minutes or until the ricotta is just beginning to turn golden and feels a little wobbly. Remove from the oven and serve warm or at room temperature.

If you'd like to join us at our next Farm Kitchen lunch, please jump over here for more information, please note we are in the process of working on some new dates and will update this page with them shortly.

Autumn tartine brunch

Although you wouldn't know it from the humid, sticky weather here this week, Autumn is upon us, and so are some of my favourite fruits; figs, apples, pears and quinces.

The last few weeks of summer have been mostly dry and dusty here, and we are so ready for the change of season. So keen to feel the cool air settle down around us, to start collecting pinecones and wood, smell that first fire of the season and to see the farm change colour (hopefully from brown back to green thank you very much).

The orchards of Orange, are thick with fruit right now. Pickers are hard at it and the markets and shops are full of late Summer and early Autumn's best. So, to celebrate this time of plenty, why not have a few friends over for a tartine brunch? Go on. It'll be fun and really delicious.

A tartine is basically a French word for an open sandwich, and in this case we've used a beautiful fruit and nut sourdough loaf, sliced thinly and toasted, then spread with homemade ricotta and topped with any of the below. This is a really great way to easily feed a bunch for brunch as you can have everything done in advance (and even that is hardly any bother) and just lay out all the different elements with a pot of coffee and one of tea for everyone to help themselves. So here's what we have here, all four tartines were delicious but my favourite was the fig one.

Homemade ricotta with quince butter
Homemade ricotta with apple butter
Homemade ricotta with poached pears and vanilla salt
Homemade ricotta with fresh figs and sweet dukkah

Vanilla salt and sweet dukkah

Both of these 'condiments' are my new addiction. They both are great to have on hand to pep up pretty much any dish, are easy to make and lovely to give away in little jars as prezzies. The vanilla salt is incredible lightly sprinkled over everything from a tomato salad to a chargrilled venison steak and in this case, poached pear tartine. Thank you so much to my new favourite food writer Renee Erickson for the idea (if you haven't seen her book A boat, a whale and a walrus, yet, please check it out).

To make the salt, just take about 1/4 cup sea salt and place in a bowl. Split the bean using the tip of a sharp knife then scrape along the cut surface to collect the vanilla seeds and mix these into the salt. At this point you can just seal the salt, with the vanilla bean pieces in a jar, ready to use. Or you could place the vanilla salt with one of the bean pieces in a food processor and whizz to combine. I do this because I quite like the little woody pieces of vanilla bean in there but you mightn't so just stick with the seeds! Keeps for a month or so.

As for the sweet dukkah, I used this recipe and am now using the end result on pretty much everything from breakfast cereal to platters of fresh fruit and bowls of natural yogurt. Warm with cardamom, cinnamon and coriander, aromatic with toasted hazlenuts and pistachios and sweetened with dates, it's just delicious and particularly good with these fig and ricotta tartines.

Homemade ricotta

Homemade ricotta is infinitely better and entirely different in taste, texture and cost, to its heavy, store-bought counterpart. Truly, it takes only minutes to make ricotta at home and the results are just beautiful. All you need is muslin (cheaply available from most kitchen shops) and a candy thermometer (again from kitchen shops, mine cost about $8 and I use it often). 

Here we spread the ricotta over thinly sliced, toasted fruit bread before topping with seasonal fruit. You can also sweeten then bake the ricotta or serve in dollops over a homemade pizza (with rocket and proscuitto).

Please give this recipe a try, it’s so satisfying and easy. Makes about 1 1/2 cups ricotta.

3 cups full fat milk

1 cup cream

1 pinch sea salt

Juice of one lemon

Heat the milk, cream and salt together in a medium-sized saucepan until the temperature reaches 190C. Remove from heat, squeeze in the lemon juice and whisk well. Let sit at room temperature, whisking every now and then, for 15 minutes then pour over a metal sieve lined with 6 pieces of muslin. Make sure the sieve doesn’t touch the whey at all.

Leave for one hour then transfer the ricotta to a bowl, cover and leave in the fridge for up to one week. Fluff up with a fork before using.  Note - We give our whey to the chooks and they seem to love it!

 

Quince butter

This post seems to be full of favourite new recipes so please excuse the superlatives. But hello quince butter...you are incredible! I've been making lots of the apple butter below recently, mostly because my kids adore the stuff and Tom, particularly seems to have it on everything from toast at breakfast to yogurt after dinner. And because we have lots of quinces on hand at the moment, thanks to my mother and mother-in-law's prolific gardens, I've been poaching them like crazy. So I thought I'd apply the same idea to one tray of quinces as the apple butter; i.e pureeing then roasting in the oven to thicken up. The result is a smooth, brightly coloured and flavoured butter-free butter.

Use quince butter wherever you'd reach for lemon curd or similar. I think it's amazing with the mellow, creamy ricotta on these tartines but it's also great with yogurt, and, we discovered yesterday, on toasted banana bread.

4-6 quinces, peeled, cored and cut into quarters (reserve the cores)
2 cups sugar
1 lemon
1 tbsp vanilla paste
1 cinnamon stick

First you need to poach your quinces. So to do this, start by preheating the oven to 150C. Combine the sugar, lemon, vanilla and cinnamon in a saucepan and bring to a boil, stirring so the sugar dissolves. then let simmer for a few minutes. Meanwhile, arrange the quince pieces in a deep baking tray, all in one layer (try not to pile them on top of each other as they may break up while cooking). Don't worry if they colour a little, this won't affect the end result at all. Tie the cores together in a piece of muslin if you have it, and add to the tray (I never seem to have any muslin on hand so just scatter a few cores over the top of the quinces then fish them out later). This serves to add colour and pectin to the fruit while cooking.

Pour the sugar syrup over the quinces and cover tightly with foil. Place in the oven for 3-4 hours or until the quinces have turned a ruby-red colour and are deliciously aromatic.

Let them cool a little then tip into a food processor, syrup and all, and blitz until really smooth. Pour the pureed quince back into your baking tray, and return (uncovered) to the oven for a further hour. This will really thicken things up nicely and, I think, intensify the flavour too. Stir every 20 minutes to make sure the bottom doesn't burn at all. Transfer to jars and seal, then keep in the fridge for a couple of weeks.

Apple butter

8 large cooking apples
2 cups water
2 tsp vanilla paste
1/2 cup golden caster sugar

Preheat oven to 150C then peel* core and cut the apples into quarters and place in an oven-proof saucepan with the water, vanilla and sugar and cook, covered for about 20 minutes (stirring every now and then).  Puree this mixture until smooth then return to the pan and place (covered) in a preheated oven for 1 hour (stir every 20 minutes though to make sure the mixture doesn’t catch at the bottom). Keep in the fridge until needed (or for a couple of weeks). Makes about 3 cups.

*You don't really need to bother with this step if rushing, it just makes for a slightly smoother, less 'green' coloured sauce in the end but I often leave the peel on and the end result is just as delicious.

So, once you have all the elements in place, just make up some nice strong tea, set a table outside if possible and have a beautiful Autumn brunch. I can't think of a yummier way to ring in the new season. x

Poached pears 

Because there's lots going on in this little brunch scenario, I kept this element pretty sweet and simple. Here's my basic recipe for poached pears. 

4 cups water

1 tsp vanilla paste or seeds of one vanilla bean

1 cup sugar

6 firm Beurre Bosc pears

Combine the water, vanilla and sugar in a large saucepan and bring to the boil. Meanwhile peel the pears (leaving them whole), and gently lower into the warm poaching liquid. Cover with a layer of baking paper (to protect against discoloration) and simmer for about 25 minutes. 

Nasturtium Pesto

 Afternoon all! Here’s hoping everyone had lovely weekends. Just a quick post from me to kick off the week and share a new favourite recipe. Our vegetable garden is wilting a little at the moment (despite daily watering), but one plant that seems to be thriving and multiplying in this heat are the nasturtiums. Alice and I threw a couple of seeds into the herb box last Spring and they are now growing like topsy.

Loathe to waste what little we actually manage to harvest from the garden, (my thumbs, are sadly, far from green),  I hit the books and found a recipe for ‘garden pesto’ in my preserving bible, The River Cottage Handbook No.2 - Preserves. The key ingredient here is a whole bunch of nasturtium leaves and despite some reservations I gave it a go. And what do you know? Bingo, this is a really great pesto recipe. The leaves are fairly peppery (I’ve since taken to adding them to salads just raw too) and add a gorgeous fresh flavour to the pesto but I do think you need to invest in a really nice piece of cheese to carry the whole thing through. You only need 80g for this recipe so about five or six dollars should get you a lovely hard sheep or cow’s milk cheese.

We tried our jar as both a dip with carrot and bread sticks and also spread it over some fish before baking. Super versatile, you can also freeze extra in ice cube trays to pop out and add to pasta and slow cooked dishes (one or two cubes will really pep up a bolognaise sauce or heavy stew). If you have an abundance of nasturtiums in your garden please give this simple idea a go. And what a considerate plant, it comes with it's very own garnish, those beautiful (edible) marigold flowers.

Nasturtium Pesto

Recipe adapted from one found in The River Cottage Handbook No.2 - Preserves. Makes about 1 1/2 cups.

50g nasturtium leaves (about 3 handfuls)
4 mint leaves
2 garlic cloves, peeled and roughly chopped
6 nasturtium seed pods*
60g pine nuts, toasted
80g hard cheese (parmesan or pecorino) grated
Juice and zest of one lemon
1/2 cup olive oil
2-3 nasturtium flowers
Salt, to taste

Combine all ingredients in a blender or food processor and blitz until you have a nice, thick consistency. Taste and add more salt, lemon juice or cheese to taste. Spoon into a glass jar and seal with a little extra olive oil then keep in the fridge until needed. That’s it!

*The green nasturtium seed pods (see  below left) add peppery flavour to this pesto but can also be pickled as you would capers, if you'd like to try this, please click over to this recipe.

Ps...I just finished writing the menu for this weekend's first Farm Kitchen lunch for 2015 (still 4 spots available) and my pickled peaches have themselves a guernsey in the entree (carpaccio). Hopefully it'll be a cool and fresh shared meal full of late summer’s best.

This is so the time of year to be writing menus, spoilt for choice in both the veggie and fruit department! If free this weekend, why not come along? Cost is $75 pp and includes the below plus a farm tour with Tim (we are BYO). Mabybe even hit the farmers markets first thing then slowly make your way out to us via some of Cargo Road’s cellar doors. Not a bad way to spend Valentines Day, whether celebrating it or not! Please email me for more information; sophie_hansen@me.com

Menu, February 14th

On arrival - Sparkling of Orange with venison salami and salted olive crisps/

Entree - Venison carpaccio with pickled peaches, peppery greens, Jannei goat’s curd and rustic garlic loaves/

Main - Chargrilled venison backstrap with a chargrilled capsicum, hazlenut and pomegranate puree/
Kipflers with nasturtium pesto/
Salad of fresh herbs and rocket and with a caramelised verjus vinaigrette/
Shaved zucchinis with garlic, mint and toasted seeds/

Pud - Nectarine tarts with tarragon and mint ice cream/