2011: the year that almost wasn’t

I am a woman of many words. But words are beginning to fail me as we approach that most arbitrary, hopeful and hollow promise of new beginnings, the hour when one year becomes another. Each of the past 364 days has dealt me struggles both large and small. I believe I am equally blessed and cursed with a mind that experiences the world more keenly than most, and one that both readily and randomly casts shadows where there should be light.

When light penetrates though, it is bright. I have been blessed with the love of my family and many friends this year, both new and old. Some of them saved my life. All of them made my life worth living. It pains me to reflect too much on the year that almost wasn’t as I begin to look forward, with real hope emerging from a darkness that I once thought interminable. Though my mind and my words tell a story of darkness, my pictures tell a story of bright light. The evidence is there, it’s incontrovertible. The camera is tricky, but it does not lie. This is how I wish to remember 2011.

Small sightseers, big river

Year of the flood

Completely wet with liquid light, Satiate, Bangalow

Heartstrings

Tribute

Speed skaters

Clash of the tartans, Yamba

Heavy metal drummer

Under the overpass

28th birthday treat

Nice stems

Curryfest princess, Woolgoolga

Colour and motion, Curryfest, Woolgoolga

Brooms Bowlo

Susan Island, Clarence River

Log chop, Glenreagh

Chicken terrine, orange and fennel flatbread, bread and butter pickles & onion marmalade (or the best meal I've ever made)

Middle Earth, Chatsworth Island

New David, New Italy

In fair Verona, where we lay our scene... (New Italy)

John Arkan, Gate to Plate, Grafton Showground

Farmer's daughter, Grafton farmers' market

Liestal, by the seaside

Little wing

Bird feeding, Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary

The old man and the sea

Grommets

Dangerous waters

Try to catch the deluge in a paper cup

Tiny dancer

Greek goddess

Family Christmas

Fasterchef

Every year, at about this time, friends and acquaintances begin encouraging me to apply for Masterchef Australia. Aside from the fact that this is largely due to a kind and flattering overestimation of my culinary skills, it is also due to an overestimation of the show’s aims. Masterchef does not seek to uncover Australia’s best amateur cook (though it has revealed many wonderful cooks over its three years of production); it seeks to uncover Australia’s best, fastest and most entertaining amateur cook. I can cook. I can also be entertaining (though not always on demand). But the baffling speed and agility required would certainly be my downfall.

Never was this more evident than this week, when I planned a picnic with my new friend Ana the Greek, a local journalist, food writer and extraordinary home cook. Our get-togethers are an excuse for foodie indulgence; to try recipes we’ve never tried before, and savour fine ingredients. We decided to split the cooking along sweet and savoury lines. Much to my relief Ana chose dessert (an excuse to use some of her recently acquired supply of Valrhona chocolate). That left me to ponder savoury options. I joked that I would prepare the Maggie Beer ‘chook and pork terrine’ wrapped in chicken skin that had sent all four remaining Masterchef contestants into elimination the night before. She joked that she would be disappointed if I didn’t.

Epic fail

Jokes aside, I browsed cookbooks and recipes online, but I couldn’t get past the idea of a terrine, the perfect picnic food, a compact and easily transportable explosion of flavour, texture and protein. Not only this, I couldn’t get past the idea of that terrine, with its abundance of herbs and citrus flavours and mouth-watering combination of fresh and cured meats. I decided that I would do it. My debut terrine would be the one that brought Masterchef’s top four competitors down. While they only had 2 hours and 15 minutes to prepare the terrine and fixins’ however, I would give myself the whole night. Surely it couldn’t take any longer than that?

Maggie Beer’s Chook and Pork Terrine

½ cup Raisins
¼ cup Verjuice
1 x 1.85kg Free range chicken
525g ‘Black Pig’ pork belly, skinless with a good amount of fat
120g ‘Black Pig’ belly bacon, rindless
120g Free range chicken livers, connective tissue removed
Zest of 2 Lemons
Zest of 1 Orange
2 tablespoons Lemon thyme, stripped and chopped
3 tablespoons Flat leaf parsley, roughly chopped
2 tablespoons Rosemary, roughly chopped
100g Fresh walnut bread, crumbed
16g Sea salt
2 teaspoons Freshly ground white pepper
3 Bay leaves

Preheat a fan forced oven to 200°C.

Place the raisins and verjuice into a small saucepan and place over a medium heat. Once the verjuice has come to simmering point, remove from the heat, place a lid on top of the saucepan and set aside, allowing the raisins to steep and plump up.

To bone out the chicken, remove the wings at the middle joint, then cut all the way down the back bone so that the chicken is now butterflied out.
Remove the back bone and rib cage, then continue your knife down to remove and cut away the breast and wish bone.

Chop the knuckles from the legs, then bone out each of the legs removing as many of the tendons as possible. Feel for any bones or gristle that may be have missed and cut these out.

Carefully remove all the meat from the skin, taking care not to pierce the skin. Dice the chicken breast into approximately 2cm cubes, place into a mixing bowl and set aside.

Dice the chicken thigh and leg meat and pork belly into approx 1 cm pieces and place into another mixing bowl. Cut the belly bacon into small strips and add this to the chicken and pork mix along with the livers, mix these together well and then place into a food processor and blend for 2 minutes to create a farce, remove from the food processor and place back into the mixing bowl. Add the lemon and orange zest, thyme, parsley, rosemary, walnut bread crumbs, the verjuice steeping liquid from the raisins, sea salt and freshly ground white pepper, mix together well and set aside.

Grease a 1 litre terrine and then place the 3 bay leaves on the base of the mould then line the mould with the skin from the chicken, place 1/3 of the farce on the base then ½ half of the chicken breast and ½ of the raisins, then another 1/3 of the farce then the remaining amount of chicken breast and raisins then top off with the remaining amount of the farce (press gently down to pack in tight). Retain any left over farce in fridge.

Now fold in both ends of the chicken skin, then fold over the two sides to create a neat looking parcel.
Place sheet of baking paper on top of the terrine then cover with foil and seal well.

Place a cloth into the base of a hot water bath, place the terrine into the water bath and put into the preheated oven and cook for 1 hour to 1 hour and 30 minutes (this time will depend on your oven and the temperature of the chicken meat) or until the internal temperature has reached 57°C, remove from the oven and allow the terrine to rest in the water bath for 15 minutes until the internal temperature has reached 65°C. The magic temperature is 65-66°C finished internal temperature.

Pour off any juices from the terrine and place into fridge to chill with a weight on top.

DAY 1

So, I had decided to embark on my very own “Masterchef journey”. My first challenge, unfortunately not having ready access to the Masterchef pantry, was to source the ingredients, some of which proved to be exotic by Grafton standards (Me – “Do you have any chicken livers?” Butcher – “Nuh.”; Bi-lo checkout-chick – “What’s this?” Me – “…a cucumber”).

I then went about prepping the ingredients for the terrine. As any good Masterchef knows, mis en place is the key to kitchen success. Prepping, prepping, and more prepping. Chopping, grating, whizzing, greasing, creating the variety of different textures in the dish. I’m not going to lie to you, this process took me over an hour . By this stage, I pretty much would have been eliminated. Which led to an important realisation: the contestants on Masterchef didn’t prep their ingredients. They can’t have. I mean, I’m no Cadel Evans, but I have zested one or two lemons in my time, and preparing everything and getting the terrine in the oven within half an hour as expected of the contestants, would have been UNPOSSIBLE! Not to worry, chefs have apprentices to do all that stuff anyhow.

The most challenging element, sorry ‘alamant’, of the preparation was the deboning and de-skinning of the chicken, something that is somewhat challenging if you’ve never done it before. It was this “pressure point” that became the make or break element of the dish on Masterchef – would they be able to do it in the 3.2 minutes provided? Would the skin have any holes in it? (Well yes, actually, because a chicken has wings and legs.) Honestly, it isn’t that hard to debone and skin a chicken. Anyone with a working knowledge of the anatomy of a chicken and a sharp knife could do it. It just takes a long time if you’ve never done it before, which is fairly reasonable considering how rarely you see the words ‘1 chicken, skin only’ in recipes. Also, it’s kind of gross (warning to those who are squeamish abut handling meat). Happily for me, time was on my side.

Once everything had been prepped, it was a breeze of assembling the dish. Aside from worrying that my chicken skin wouldn’t be big enough to encase all of the mixture, it was a doddle. It’s really just putting stuff in a tin and then other stuff on top of that stuff. Soon enough I was able to pop it in the oven. Time check. Including the time I spent washing up and cleaning down as I went, periodically checking Facebook and watching the Sopranos (appropriate viewing while dismembering a chicken), it took me about 4 hours from scratch to oven. OK, so by this time I’m a massive loser, but it’s worth noting that I do possess one of the other desirable Masterchef attributes: I am a perfectionist control freak. So yeah, it took me a while.

I cooked the terrine until the internal thermometer said stop, then I rested it until the thermometer said stop again, aware that this was the point where Michael, Dani, Kate and Alana met their downfall, the glistening skins of their terrines concealing the worst of culinary sins – pink chicken meat. It’s tempting to cut into the terrine to check whether it is cooked at this point, but you can’t; instead you have to spend a sleepless night wondering and/or dreaming about it. You see, the next step in the terrine process is refrigeration. This is why I was confused when Matt Preston chastised his contestants for their undercooked meatloaves, asking Gary and George whether they would have sent that out at their restaurants. Well, n0, but no self-respecting chef would have cooked a terrine to order you ninny, they would have cooked it that morning, or preferably two days ago. And if it was undercooked, they wouldn’t have taken it out of the oven because of some arbitrary time limit. DER!

At this point, you’re probably thinking, but what about all the fixins? Well, you’re right. Frankly, there’s so much cleaning up to do, one doesn’t really have time for fixins’. And so they would wait ’til the morrow. And with that, I went to bed, 6 hours after this journey had begun.

DAY 2

I awoke early, after little sleep, on the day of the picnic. There was much to do! First was the walnut flatbread. Reading the recipe, I thought good, this will be a cinch, because compared to the complexity of the terrine it read like cooking two-minute noodles. Needless to say, it wasn’t quite that simple. And yet, for this novice breadmaker, it was simple enough. Within an hour or so, I was pulling beautifully golden ovals out of the oven, dusted with salt and fennel seeds. The flavour was a revelation. The bread may even have been the highlight of the completed dish. Success!

I also whipped up a batch of bread and butter pickles, a la Maggie Beer. To be honest, I was disappointed with their flavour, which didn’t have the sweet/sour punch I like in a pickle. But I would be putting it up on the plate, and that’s the most important thing!

With just a couple of hours until our picnic, the moment of truth: the time had come to turn out the terrine and slice it. SUCCESS! I couldn’t believe how perfect it looked, shining on the wooden board like a jewel-encrusted pate. Tasting, it was incredibly dense, salty and texturally diverse, with hints of thyme, rosemary and bay. I had done it! I could hardly believe that everything had come together. With a total preparation and cooking time of 9 hours, I had long ago lost the challenge, but I had learned much about the magic of television. In the end, I’d rather take my sweet time and savour the process of cooking, not to mention eating. And so the journey continued…

Terrine and fixins'

Nice slice

The picnic table, Strontian Park, Great Marlow

Lunch

Invention test: Ana's chocolate torte with strawberries and cream, strawberry pop rocks, tuile

Timberrrrrrrrrr!

Sadly my creative juices haven’t been flowing lately; at least, I think I have been expending them on resurrecting my musical talent instead of arranging words in a pleasing fashion. Though I also haven’t had the camera out much lately, I did manage to take some photographs of an exciting excursion at the weekend: the 7th Annual Glenreagh Timber Festival!

Glenreagh is currently known as that town near where Russell Crowe lives sometimes, and is soon to be known as that town with the giant statue of a dog, that may be part dog, part kangaroo (no pictures, sorry). I was invited to check out the action by my wonderful friends Mrs and Mrs Leicester and their family, and we spent a lovely afternoon picnicking in the sun and watching large men wield axes with our new friends the Friendly Timbermillers.

The sport of woodchopping is a lot more structured and elaborate than I expected. It’s not just a bunch of blokes hacking into lumps of wood. There are rules. I don’t know what they are, but they seemed to be very complicated. The whole thing reminded me of a Freemason-style secret society, complete with handshake and a uniform of singlets, white pants and white dunlop volleys. OK, I made up the handshake bit, but it could be true. I did not make up the Dunlop Volleys. These were ubiquitous. I wonder if they were steel caps.

Apart from the dazzling array of champion axe-men, there were sheep dog trials, pony rides and a humungous jumping castle which was very popular with the four-year-old. Here are some of the highlights of my day.

Fancy looking sheep

Working puppy

The entertainment

Floss fairy

Loads of logs

The axeman

Fence post splitting in under 5 minutes

Late in the day

Specialty footwear

Endless summer

We all like to think of winter as a time to indulge in comfort food: boldly flavoured slow braises; soups, stews and ragouts; pies with flaky pastry and fall-apart fillings; Sunday roasts. In my part of the world however, the truth is that we don’t really experience winter, at least in the extreme way we experience summer, and that is reflected in the produce that grows in our climate. Though of course the shorter days and chill in the air pique the appetite for the classic foods of winter, we need not subsist on lamb shanks and turnips alone.

Reflecting the mildness of our winter, our garden is currently full of heirloom tomatos planted at the end of the warm season. I didn’t expect them to thrive, and although they have been slow growing compared to the summer crop, they are prolific to the point that we’re eating them nearly every day.

I was a latecomer to the lure of Pomodoro in their virgin form, previously preferring the shit to be cooked out of them before ingestion. No doubt this was due to the hard, floury, insipid specimens that populated supermarket shelves when I was growing up in the ’80s and ’90s. The fruity half of the old iceberg lettuce and tomato salad was to be avoided, and literally made me gag. I started coming around when premium ‘vine-ripened’ fruit began to appear in supermarkets.

A delightful revelation took place however when I tried my first organic heirloom tomatoes from The Farm Gate by Nashdale Fruit Co and realised what a tomato is supposed to taste like! These were fruit that I actually wanted to eat unadorned and uncooked. Since then I have embraced the increasing availability of heirloom varieties, recently making friends with a tomato specialist at the local farmers market who helps me select the best fruit.

Most of my fresh tomatoes come out of the garden though and we’re always looking for new ways to prepare them. We had a particularly large harvest last week, and I decided that I wanted to make the tomatoes the star of the meal. As always when I am contemplating a vegetarian recipe I consulted that expansive cookbook, google, to find out what Yotam Ottolenghi, chef, Guardian columnist and author of Plenty, had to say on the matter. This recipe for a (lively, summery) tomato ‘galette’ was just the ticket: it would take advantage of the range of beautiful tomatoes in different hues, and I already had all of the ingredients in the garden/larder. I haven’t cooked with sundried tomatoes much since the 90s, but in this context they provide a great punch of concentrated tomato flavour. You could also substitute pesto or tapenade. I also included some glorious anchovies, which beautifully complement the tomatoes and provide an extra salty hit.

Herbage

Yotam Ottolenghi’s tomato galette

375g all-butter puff pastry

8 stalks fresh oregano, leaves picked and roughly chopped

100g goats’ cheese, crumbled (I used some beautiful Meredith cheese)

450g red, yellow or green tomatoes of various sizes, sliced 2mm thick

8 stalks fresh thyme

8 anchovies (optional)

Olive oil

For the sundried tomato paste

10 sun-dried tomatoes from a jar

2 anchovies (optional)

1 fresh red chilli, sliced

2 garlic cloves

½ tsp sugar

1 tsp salt

Preheat the oven to 200c. Roll out the pastry to 3mm thick and cut out four rectangles about 10cm x 15cm. Transfer the pastry rectangles to a large baking sheet lined with baking paper and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

To make the sun-dried tomato paste, put all the ingredients in the small bowl of a food processor and process to a rough paste; if necessary, add a bit of oil to bring it together.

Spread a thin layer of the tomato paste over the chilled pastry, leaving a border about 1cm from the edge. Sprinkle with the oregano and goats’ cheese, and arrange the tomatoes on top, slightly overlapping but not too precisely. Make sure the tomato paste is covered by fresh tomatoes because it tends to burn. Place two anchovy fillets on the top of each tart. Drop the thyme stalks over the tomatoes and drizzle with a little olive oil.

Bake for 15 minutes, until golden on top; check the base to make sure the pastry is brown and fully cooked. Remove from the oven and leave to cool before drizzling over more olive oil and serving warm.

The tart was brilliant, full of flavour and light but satisfying. I served it with a simple salad I knocked up with some roasted beetroot, blanched sugar snap peas and (more) Meredith goats’ cheese. Colourful and flavourful food to brighten up a winter’s day.

My kind of salad

Life.

Hello strangers, it has been a long time since our last encounter. The past months have seen me return to work after a long period of rest and recalibration. I am still privileged to be a part of the amazing Dictionary of Sydney team thanks to the magic of the interwebs. I was also recently thrilled to be asked to join the team at local creative hub Yoohoo Web & Graphic Design, where I am writing, editing and collaborating on design projects. I have also just taken on a new role managing publicity and promotions for the local Clarence Valley Business Excellence Awards. I feel like I’m back in my element doing what I do best: communicating and connecting.

Essentially, I am working towards making writing, and writing-related activities, my profession. To this end, I am constantly seeking projects in different media, and today I proudly made the leap from the letters page to the lifestyle section, with my first story published in the Daily Examiner, our excellent local rag. My experience researching this story was an example of the great privilege that comes with being a writer; the opportunity to meet a quietly extraordinary person and capture their life in words. A life that puts your own in perspective. For those of you who aren’t locals, I’ve reproduced the article below.

True survivor did it all on his Pat Malone

By Felicity Watson (Daily Examiner, 4 June 2011)

 

Pat Bancroft is a quiet and unassuming man who has lived an extraordinary life. At 90 years of age, he is nearly three decades older than the average life expectancy of Aboriginal men. He began his working life aged 10 and has survived war, economic depression and the dangerous toil of years of gold and asbestos mining. And yet, he continues to live and work on the land as he always has.

Born in 1920 to Arthur Bancroft and his second wife, Aboriginal woman Annie Tindal, Pat grew up in the small goldmining town of Lionsville. Before the Great War, Arthur had some lucrative interests including Mount Arthur and the Mountain Maid, which yielded over 500 ounces of gold (worth more than $500,000 in today’s prices). By 1920 however, the once bustling towns of Lionsville and Solferino were languishing, the mining boom a distant memory. 

On the Banks of the Washpool, 2009, by Bronwyn Bancroft. Pat, left, poses with his brother Bill, the artist's father, c1925. (Courtesy of Bronwyn Bancroft and Wilson Street Gallery)

By the time ten-year-old Pat began to work for his father, Australia was gripped by the Great Depression. ‘There wasn’t much in the depression days, in the 30s, you’d go and do whatever you could. Trap rabbits in the winter, cut girders,’ says Pat.

Despite this hardship, Arthur had faith, and his luck came in when he struck a 60 ounce nugget in 1935, a rare find which made news around the country.

Pat soon learned to make the tools of his trade. ‘We used to call it a whip but it was pretty rough,’ he says of his first whip, made at age ten. The packhorses needed to be shod if they were to transport ore along the steep mountain tracks each day, and Pat became a fine blacksmith.

He was a keen sportsman, one of the founding members of the Lionsville cricket team. Formed in 1937, the team had a few successful seasons, but everything changed after the outbreak of World War II.

Pat left the Clarence Valley for the first time when he enlisted in 1941, joining the 2/4th Australian Pioneer Battalion along with many others from the North Coast. They travelled north and worked on defensive positions between Adelaide River and Darwin.
On 14 February 1942 the battalion sailed for Timor, but came under attack from Japanese bombers and was forced to retreat. Later camped out by the Darwin airstrip, ‘these planes came over, we’d seen them a couple of days before’.

The bombs fell on 19 February, sinking the ship that had brought them back to Darwin just the previous day. After surveying the damage, the 2/4th started digging defences past the airstrip, working through the night. Amid the chaos and fear, ‘all you could do was go and do something,’ remembers Pat.

After another 13 months defending Darwin, the 2/4th traveled to the Atherton Tablelands for jungle training before travelling to Morotai and Labuan, off the coast of Borneo. It was while they were here that ‘[the Americans] dropped the bomb and the peace was signed’.

The war had changed everything, including life on the home front. ‘It was easier to get on after the war, there was plenty going on, y’know. [In the] 1930s, for ten years it was hard going for everybody,’ he says.

Lionsville, 1940Upon his return to Lionsville, Pat found work fencing, droving and at the Baryugil asbestos mine. He purchased his first property, with 700 head of cattle, in 1950. He also 'played a lot of good cricket'.

Over the decades, Pat has rarely missed a cattle sale, rodeo or camp draft. His life on the land continues. While he now lives in Southgate, he visits Lionsville regularly to work on his old property, since passed on to his niece, acclaimed artist Bronwyn Bancroft.

Through his family, Pat has fostered a new generation of custodians. Much of Bronwyn’s art is inspired by the country around Lionsville and her family’s history. She describes her work as ‘about respecting and reinforcing the hard work that members of my family put in, both the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal’.

Pat continues to make his now famous stock whips. Objects of beauty and practicality, they speak not only of his skill, but of his life and the land he loves. He cures and cuts out the leather by hand, then binds it to a handle of hand-carved water gum from Lionsville. The same wood his Pop used, light and strong.

Pat's now famous stock whips are objects of beauty and practicality. (Photo: Felicity Watson)