Testing out the Trotters

Offal: the parts of an animal butchered that are unfit for use (Webster).

What a great start.

The past few weeks we’ve been collecting our offal from the abattoir. It comes in a plastic bag within a plastic bag: ears, trotters, tails, cheeks, and jowls all together. The tails still have the fluffy whip-like bits on the end of them and the ears are old-man hairy. Our red dirt is still between their toes.

I feel an obligation to at least try all the parts. It must go back to the single brussels sprout Mum used to put on my plate. Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to, even if it involves stuffing it in our mouths and chewing really fast. If an animal has to die for us to eat meat we’ve got to make the most of it.

The trotters felt a bit like a dead person’s hand. Cold and clammy, bloodless. I ran some hot water and with a sharp knife scraped away the dirt and callused skin. I got a lighter and singed the black hairs…although it didn’t really work, so I pulled them out by hand.

The recipe I found on the net “Chinese-style pigs’ trotters” (Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, of course) asked me to brown the trotters in a pan. If someone had walked in the door and sniffed they would have thought I was cooking up brawn for dogs. But I was determined.

I added apple juice, soy sauce, caster sugar, chillies, garlic and ginger, then put it all in the crock pot for eight hours.

When I came home that night I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even spoon out the sauce to try. I told myself it would be better in the morning after it’d had time to sit, anyway. I did notice that the trotters didn’t look like trotters anymore. A good sign.

Day two: couldn’t face it for breakfast, so put the pot in the fridge (a chance for the fat to rise and set). But throughout the day, I worked on convincing myself I had a wonderful meal waiting for me at night.

I picked pak choi, snow peas and coriander from the garden and cooked noodles. Then I heated up the trotters and put it all together. It was a bit like an Asian soup, with lots of bones and bits of skin. I didn’t come across any hooves or claws. I did find a couple of tiny slivers of meat, two for each trotter.

The end product was no where near as traumatic to eat as it was to prepare. And I think I would happily serve it up as an entrée for visitors, it was pretty rich as a main meal. They just might not find out exactly where the meat came from till after the washing up.

Living with wildlife

One of the great things about Mount Gnomon Farm is that it borders natural bush that extends from the seaside town of Penguin through to the central plateau. In fact, if one of our pigs decided to go for a walk, they could follow the Penguin to Cradle trail to Cradle Mountain and if they had enough energy they could then do the overland track all the way through to Lake St Clair.

Not only does the farm’s location allow us to go on fantastic bush walks from our back door, it also results in some of Tasmania’s magnificent wildlife visiting our farm. This week we were woken by a different sound in the orchard. After turning on the flood light we watched a Tasmanian Devil as it surveyed the orchard to see if any of our poultry had failed to find a secure and safe place to sleep.

The devil looked healthy and seemed free of any facial tumours - the symptom of the lethal disease that has just spread to devils in our area. While normally a scavenger, devils will take poultry. Fortunately we had shut up all the chooks and ducks, which is a nightly job to protect them from devils and the two native quolls: the eastern quoll and the spotted tail quoll, which are also well-known for taking poultry.

At the moment we’re using our future garden shed to shut up the chooks, but in the future we intend to build a quoll-proof chook house that the chooks can fly in and out of, but quolls and devils can’t enter. There’s a great design on the parks website.

But in the meantime, our ducks have to be herded into a covered pen at night. Fortunately our Indian Runners are very easy to train. If they’re not already in the shelter, at the sight of us at dusk they quickly waddle in. The Indian Runner has more of a herding mentality than any other species - it's the reason they're used at sheep dog trials.

In South East Asia, where they originate, large flocks are kept for integrated pest management in rice fields. At dawn the ducks are released from their shelters and follow their master to the rice paddies. When he puts up a flag the ducks know it’s time to go to work and they have to keep within eyesight of the flag. At the end of the day when their master takes down the flag they know it’s time to go home.

Our ducks aren’t quite at the same level, but one day when we get some spare time, Guy has dreams of training one of our Wessex pigs to herd our ducks - Babe style. Guy is convinced our pigs would be capable of negotiating a new password with the ducks, something a bit more ducky than ‘baa ram ewe’.

Everyone loves to scratch a piggy

One of our goals for Mount Gnomon Farm is to open it up for the public as much as we can.

This week we had a visit from a group of parents and children who home-school.

It was wonderful to watch the kids scratching a pig for the first time and laugh as they saw the piglets’ ears flop around while they chased each other.

It ‘s really important for children to learn where their food comes from, and that there are different ways of producing meat – some ethical, some not.

And when we talk to their parents we can explain why we need to protect rare breeds, and why free-range is the only humane system.

Hopefully we can sow seeds that will change people’s buying habits, in time.

Domino has a seat while Guy talks to the group, and Betty and Big Bertha line up for scratches.

Telling Tales

We've got three new arrivals on the farm! Guy's just been to Victoria on the boat and brought back two sows and a boar of different bloodlines. So we need to think of names....we like to keep the first letter the same as the name of the line, so for example we've got Bramble, Betty and Big Bertha who are from the Beatrice line. Our two new girls comes from the Lass and May lines, and our little boy is a Satellite. Any suggestions for L, M, and S names?

Our Lass girl has a strange tail. There's no denying it. But we celebrate difference on this farm, so all's well. She might just have to practice curling it up in the Mount Gnomon Farm way (see below).

Some pig farmers don't have the pleasure of watching pig's tails unfurl and wind-up. On intensive farms where the pigs are kept inside they cut off their tails when they're a week old so they don't chew them off each other when they get bored.

We're yet to try eating tail, but we've just bought a book from the UK, Nose to Tail Eating by acclaimed St. John Restaurant chef Fergus Henderson that has lots of offal recipes in it (Offal, not awful...). We're going to try this recipe and we'll let you know how it goes...

You need: 8 long pig's tails, 2 onions, 2 carrots and 2 celery sticks roughly chopped, bundle of fresh herbs, 3 bay leaves, 10 black peppercorns, 1 head of garlic, zest of 1 lemon, 1/2 bottle of red wine, 1.1 litres chicken stock, 2 tbsp English mustard, 4 eggs whisked together, 450g seasoned flour, 225g fine white breadcrumbs, a large knob of butter.

Fergus says to put the tails in a dish with the vegetables, herbs, peppercorns, garlic, lemon zest, wine and stock, and then cover and cook for three hours in a medium oven. Allow them to cool in the stock, then take them out before it turns to jelly.

When they're cold and firm, mix together the mustard and eggs, then dip them in flour, roll through the mustard and egg mixture and coat them in breadcrumbs. Get a large roasting tray hot, melt the butter, then add the tails and cook in a hot over for 10 minutes, turn them over and cook for another 10. Sounds yummy - we'll have to start collecting our tails.

Carrot-pulling pleasure

Why do shop carrots taste so much worse than homegrown carrots? The difference is astonishing. So it's a major relief to be pulling my own now they're starting to get a bit of size. The few months over winter when we had to buy vegetables - we'd only just come to the farm and it was too wet and cold to grow anything - was a good reminder of how important it is to grown your own. The shop veggies were droopy before I even got them in the car, their flavour was dreadful, and I would be surprised if they had any nutrients left in them by the time they got to the table. Guy complained we weren't eating enough veggies - well I wonder why?!

But now! I can go in to the patch each evening and select what we're having for tea and it goes straight from the soil to the pot or plate. The choices are still fairly limited because of the time of year...we've been eating a fair bit of silverbeet, bok choy and broccoli (Beet and broc au gratin is surprisingly yummy with lots of cracked pepper and good cheese). The salad veggies are also coming on and here's a selection of what we had last night.

The potatoes are poking through, the corn's going upwards, the garlic's almost ready to harvest, I've had my first handful or raspberries (don't tell Guy!), I've got the best germination of parsnips I've ever seen, and the pumpkins, squash melons etc are doing a terrific job at standing up in the ferocious winds that come across the garden. Hurry up and grow shelterbelts!

Had a bit of a disaster with my tomato seedlings...I started a different shift at work and forgot to open up the cold frame they were under. It wasn't a super hot day, but by the time I got home I had 58 dead seedling and two live ones. The soil was still moist, but they were fried. Am scrambling now to get a few left-over seedling from friends.

If you've got a couple of pumpkins that need using at the end of the season, I tried this recipe from Hobart cook and writer Sally Wise. Quite unusual and delicious.

3 tablespoons olive oil, 250g chopped onions, 1 cooking apple, cored and chopped, 500g diced pumpkin, 8 garlic cloves, 1 cup water, 1 tablespoon fresh ginger, 2 teaspoons mustard powder, 1 tablespoon salt, 125g sultanas, 375g brown sugar, 90g white sugar, 2 cups cider vinegar, 1 teaspoon ground allspice, 2 teaspoons curry powder, 1 teaspoon nutmeg.

In a saucepan saute onions, apple, pumpkin and garlic for five minutes. Add the water and cook until pumkin is tender. Add everything else, bring to boil, then simmer for about 40 mins till it becomes like chutney. Put in sterilised jars, keep for two weeks in the pantry then eat!