Tips to warm up: eat chestnuts, shovel pig poo

Evening itinerary:

Arrive home from day job as the sun sets.

Check last night's 13 newborns (when I watched steam rise from their wet, warm bodies).

Shovel out stables where mums and babies are, replace with fresh barley straw.

Pick grass for squeaking guinea pigs and sniffing rabbit.

Pick kale for hungry human (curly and red russian).

Roast chestnuts (from Preolenna, high rainfall area in the far north-west) under hot grill.

Invent kale fritters with chopped, cooked kale, buff sussex eggs, crumbly local cheese, and breadcrumbs.

Autumn is definitely here, there's no doubting it now. Speaking in short sentences also helps conserve energy for warmth.

A morning at funny farm

Feather fascinator

This buff sussex hen was quite put-out this morning when a feather got stuck to her comb. A couple of hours after I took the photo she was still trying to shake it off.

Remember the sow with the funny tail that arrived on the farm in December last year?

We thought she must have had it trod on when she was a piglet, but it appears the shape is heritable. One of her nine piglets is not quite like the others.

We've got a lot of little piggies running round getting in to trouble at the moment. They're just the right size to slide under the electric fence.

So straight to the grain shed they go...

And from her seat on the rock wall outside the stable, Puss observes it all. What a farm to have been dumped at, she thinks.

(More on the cat, and the division she has caused, in a future post).

Taking it slow at Stanley

Six courses, over four hours, with a showery autumn afternoon blowing outside.

We’re at Stanley on a lazy Sunday afternoon celebrating the season’s produce.

We were fortunate enough to have our pork on the menu at The Old Cable Station’s autumn ‘producer’s lunch’ – a slow food event that happens quarterly.

Charlotte Brown and Michael Whatley prepared a feast for almost 50 people, and this was the menu:

- Slow-roasted capsicum with ricotta cheese and vine ripened tomatoes
- Spicy Sassafras parsnip soup
- Mutton bird and duck terrine with a pepperberry and tomato marmalade
- Free-range egg fettuccine pasta ‘al funghi’
- Twice cooked crispy skinned Wessex Saddleback pork belly on parmesan risotto with chilli jam (that was us!)
- ‘Mile high’ apple pie with double cream
- And wines from Tamar vineyard Native Point.

You can already see it was about slow food…even the capsicum was slow-roasted and our pork was twice-cooked!

The slow food movement is all about food that is good, clean and fair. It’s about getting people to care about what they eat and where it comes from, and to realise that their food choices do affect other people and the environment.

Slow Food Australia has more than 40 branches, and across the world there are 100,000 members in 132 countries. At the moment they’re campaigning for cheese to be legally made from raw milk, and against urban sprawl on productive farmland.

We think our pigs fit the slow food philosophy pretty well. They’re slow growers to start with – they take almost double the time of an intensively raised pig!

But we also think we’re doing the right thing by them ethically. They can root around in the dirt, get in a mud bath, play with their piggy friends, and they’ve got sea and mountain views from their paddocks.

The slow food movement is also about preserving biodiversity, and thus our food supply. The varieties of fruit, vegetables and meat we eat have been boiled down to the ones that look good, travel well, and can sit in a supermarket cool store for months. Unfortunately taste wasn’t on the checklist during the reduction.

And it’s also about valuing the food we have, and the people who produce it. A farmer needs to be fairly rewarded for what he grows. If he’s not, animal welfare and the environment will be compromised as he tries to produce more to pay the bills.

We had a lovely lunch at Stanley, meeting people who truly value what they eat and who want to know the story behind it.

(Thank you to Kevin O'Daly for the photos ... scrumptious.)

In the cradle of change

I grew up “going out for tea” at places where menus were dominated by five dollar parmies and roasts-of-the-day.

And frankly, on the north-west coast, there wasn’t much else for a family looking to celebrate a birthday or anniversary.

Guy’s family didn’t even go out for tea – it was never going to be as good as what came out of the garden.

It’s a region of contradictions here: from our office window I can see fertile paddocks running from here to the sea that have all produced high-quality, intense-flavoured food this season.

Our neighbours have boer goats that taste better than lamb, and our other neighbour has the healthiest murray grey cattle I’ve seen.

On our road alone there are two walnut orchards, a farmer who exports onions, and even a pheasant grower.

We’re surrounded by great food, but even at the bottom of our road, where country meets town, is one of those parmy places.

It’s a strange food culture here. The meals are about quantity, not quality. Chips and salad means a mountain of chips and one slice of hard-as-rock mainland-grown tomato.

Fortunately, the choice of good restaurants on the coast is growing, especially in Burnie and Penguin.

There are a number of places going out of their way to source fine local produce to do interesting things with. We'll bring you more information about them on the blog.

A night on a mountain

Over Easter we went to Cradle Mountain Lodge to try our pork at the Highland Restaurant – where the executive chef is Simon Cordwell.

Simon has been a great supporter of us in the start-up of our business. He’s passionate about sourcing local food, and knowing the full story behind it.

The first thing he wanted to do when he found out we had pigs was to come and see the farm so he knew they were genuine free-range and being ethically farmed.

It was so heartening to know that he would actually go out of his way – all the way down from the mountain - to check us out.

So, to our meal at the Highland Restaurant: as an entree Simon braises the pork belly and serves with shitake mushrooms and Asian greens. The recipe is on Simon’s blog and involves garlic, ginger, shallots, soy sauces, star anise, and cinnamon.

We also ordered the salmon plate, which has three pieces of salmon each treated differently, including cured with citrus. They were served with a dob of freshly-grated wasabi, and it was great knowing this came from our close friend Melina Parker from Shima Wasabi.

It’s always difficult sharing a plate of food with Guy. He comes from a family of five children so has a survival-of-the-fittest mentality, and I’m from a family of one, which may have influenced my sharing habits.

Never-the-less I’ve found that dividing shared meals in half from the start, and then protecting my half with raised knife and fork seems to work. Just don’t let your guard down for a slurp of wine.

For main we had our pork loin with maple roasted pear, sweet potato batons and grain mustard jus. Just beautiful.

We had been so excited sitting down in the restaurant and hearing other people order our pork, and Guy just had to tell our waitress straight away we were the pig farmers.

The fellow sitting closest to us was eating the pork belly entree and Guy whispered, “should I ask him what he thinks?”.

I said he should at least wait till the poor bloke had finished eating.

Two seconds later: “should I ask him now?”.

I thought he should wait till the plate had been collected, then we might hear him make a comment to the waitress.

Guy couldn’t control himself.

Turns out the fellow’s a chef in Launceston, and really liked the pork. Guess where a box got sent out this week?

Guy and Eliza walk off the pork belly on the Marion's Lookout track.

It's amazing how these plants survive through the incredible extremes of the highlands.

The leaves of the nothofagus gunnii (Tasmania's only deciduous plant) are just starting to turn.

Is that pork on your plate really white meat?

It’s the season for eating white meat: chicken and fish have been flying off the supermarket shelves over the past couple of days. And in recent decades pork has also been marketed as the “other white meat”.

The pork industry has been promoting it as an alternative to chicken for families looking for a cheap, low-fat, and nutritious form of protein. But is pork actually a white meat and what is the difference between red and white meats?

We’ve been chewing on this a fair bit lately, as one of the biggest differences we’ve noticed about our free range Wessex saddleback pork is the colour of the meat – it’s a lot darker (and that’s apart from the extra flavour and juiciness). It’s particularly noticeable with the meat found in the legs and shoulders.

Wessex Saddleback pork shoulder cross section

So why is meat light or dark? It all comes down to two different types of muscles: slow-twitch and fast-twitch. Animals will have different coloured meat depending on what type of muscles they use and their ratio of slow to fast-twitch muscles.

The slow ones are used often, for extended activities like constant walking, standing or flying. They’re the muscles found in the shoulders of pigs or the thighs and legs of chickens. Slow-twitch muscles are slower to contract, good for endurance, and are the muscles needed to help a marathon runner go the distance.

They need a lot of fuel and they get this through the protein myoglobin, which stores large amounts of oxygen to support the long-term energy use. Myoglobin is a reddish colour, sort of like hemoglobin in blood, which is why slow-twitch muscles are dark. They’re also linked with more fat or marbling, as fat has to be kept close-by for the constant demand for fuel.

In general, the more exercise a muscle gets, and the older the animal, the greater the need for myoglobin, and so the meat’s darker. Slow-twitch muscles, or red meat, tend to hold moisture better, have more fat, and hence are more flavoursome and forgiving to cook.

Fast-twitch muscles are used for sudden bursts of quick movement – like the breast of a chicken to help it escape from a predator. They have smaller amounts of myoglobin and instead need glycogen for their energy. They’re the muscle fibre types that a sprinter develops.

Fast-twitch muscles, or white meat, tend to carry less fat and while they can be tender if cooked properly they tend to be dry and bland and lack the flavour of slow-twitch muscles.

This explains why the working joints of free range pigs are not only darker in colour but also have more flavour, because of the marbling. An intensive pig that lazes about and is processed at a much younger age will have less slow-twitch muscles and its meat won’t be as dark and when cooked it is usually dry and lacks flavour.

Over the years meat breeders have been selecting animals that grow fast, and so they’ve got more fast-twitch muscles – making the meat leaner and whiter. This is what’s happened in the pork industry, because of its desire to sell itself as the “other white meat”.

The real casualty has been the loss of breeds with a higher ratio of slow-twitch muscles. Fortunately we’ve still got some old breeds like the Wessex Saddleback that haven’t been influenced by modern genetics and the push for fast, lean growth. They have the unique property of a lot of slow-twitch muscles, marbling, and best of all, moisture and flavour.

So if you’re having white meat this Easter, you’d better stick to your fish or chicken breast, or, the loin of an intensive farmed white pig!