It was a March hare’s mad tea party of a show today. Alison Drover was our guest fresh reporter and she was in an Italian mood, she prepared a whole lot of info on fruit and veg in season in March, especially zucchini eggplant and figs, then she couldn’t get to the studio so sister T has to pretend to be much blonder and nicer and better dressed (you can tell in the voice) and read out all Alison’s info and recipes. On the first belly in April though, she will be live on air in person. Also, straight from the belly lab, a wonderful new discovery, lychee choc tops, the belly bulletin featuring breast milk ice cream, stories from fabulous community radio food shows, lots of women’s voices to celebrate 100 years of International Women’s day, Danish mardi gras, and this week’s markets as usual.

ALISON’S GUEST FRESH REPORT : IN SEASON AROUND AUSTRALIA IN MARCH

This month March and I tend to think I am very Italian because it is the season for many fruits and vegetables, which characterize a lot of Italian cooking…  The fig, the zucchini flower, the eggplant, the zucchini, pumpkins and basil.

It is about using the seasons in abundance having a lot of something like eggplant and adding something special to it like an artisan cheese or some prosciutto but taking time to prepare the vegetables well. The Italians are inherently sustainable in the kitchen and supplement vegetables, which are low carbon footprint with small amounts of meat or often than not any meat and also make flavorsome cheeses, curds and intense pestos.

Zucchini Flowers – are at the markets however they disappear. Harris Farm and other groceries stock them however it is worth talking to your grower and even asking to reserve some. They are fragile and therefore you need to consider this with regards to price. They price can vary from anything to $4.00 a punnet upwards. The best incentive to grow food is to taste it.  The recipe that I have provided is for zucchini flowers and is a little “special” however worthwhile and then another that can be whipped up easily.

Corn …is ready and its arrival was celebrated in Corndale at the Chicken and Corn night in a few weeks ago at the Community Hall.

March is the month of figs. This is a time to seek them out and dedicate meals to them. I love figs grilled with cheese, salad, balsamic and roasted macadamias however they are good in so many ways especially on top of cakes.  Finding the Fig – figs are not going to be everywhere like the custard apple or the lime however this makes them more treasured. Look for them at local stores ie Bexhill Store has some great ones bought in by locals or the markets.  They have only a very short window at their peak so check out the local market now to see if you can get them. Figs grow quite well on the North Coast, despite coming from a more Mediterranean climate. The delicious plump fruits are highly perishable and can only be stored in the fridge for a few days. You can poach, grill and bake figs and add them to salads.

Custard Apples – love to grow in this region and are plentiful and often found on the side of the road at stalls as well as at the markets. More and more recipes for using them http://www.custardapple.com.au Peter Gilmore from the Quay restaurant in Sydney made them famous with the Custard Apple ice cream which is great.

Eggplants are glossy purple and in abundance. Many people overlook this vegetable however it is such diversity. The recipe I have included is for an eggplant stack with roasted tomato sauce, feta and basil. Whole eggplants can stored for two weeks in the fridge but once cut, they quickly discolour. Eggplant can be sliced and fried for use in lasagna but this method soaks up a lot of oil. Whole eggplants can be sliced lengthways and roasted for half an hour or so in a moderate oven until they collapse. The skin can be easily peeled off and the flesh pureed with tahini, lemon juice, a hint of crushed garlic, a teaspoon of cumin and a little olive oil and salt to make a brilliant dip – Baba Ganoush.  Of course you can mix eggplant with other ‘in season’ vegies such as tomatoes and zucchini to make a  ratatouille, which is basically a mixed, or roasted vegetables and onion in a tomato sauce. I take out all the tomatoes that I harvested in December from the freezer and mix them with the zucchini and eggplant.

Zucchini are robust and will keep in the fridge for a while and can be grated to make fritters with, chargrilled and layered like the eggplant, diced and fried with pasta or can be oven roasted with oil and garlic and rosemary make a great salad for a bbq.

March is the month for harvesting and eating beans, beetroot and Bok Choy. Beans of all sizes and shapes including green (or French), butter beans (yellow), scarlet (actually purple) and runner beans are in season now. One idea is steamed with basil, chopped boiled egg, macadamia oil and some red onion.

Baby beetroot should also be ready now and available at your local market. If you grow your own, you have the added bonus of using the tops – the smaller leaves in salads or the larger leaves in cooking, as you would use spinach. The roots are good sources of vitamins B1; B2 and the leaves are high in Vitamin C.

March is the month for:

• Making lime cordial so that you can top up your vitamin C in winter when limes are going to be very expensive

• Celebrating the fig – bake a cake, roast them poach them grill them

• Eating eggplant every which way and how

• Enjoying berries blueberries and strawberries before they disappear.

• Eating plums the last of the stoned fruit although in this area look for the sugar plums as they grow better here

Fruits in season this month:

• Apples – galas and red delicious have been in the shops for a few weeks, while Jonathons are coming off the trees at the moment

• Avocadoes – Hass are finishing up, but Shephards are coming into season

• Bananas

• Berries – this is the end of the season, but blueberries and blackberries are still very good

• Figs

• Fuji fruit

• Guava

• Mangoes – Kensington Prides have finished but the end of season Palmer mangoes are beautiful

• Pears – William, Sensation and Bosc

• Pineapples – Bethongas are still great

• Plums are gorgeous at the moment – particularly radiance and I’ve seen the first of the tiny sugar plums

• Pomegranates – mostly still fruit from the US, but the local supply will start later in March

• Quinces

• Rhubarb

Vegetables in season this month:

• Asian greens

• Beans

• Broccoli

• Brussels sprouts – the season is just starting

• Capsicums are good and cheap

• Cucumbers

• Chestnuts should be coming in later in the month

• Chillies

• Eggplant – the long thin Italian eggplants are particularly good

• Lettuce – although they’ve been small recently

• Mushrooms

• Okra

• Potatoes – Dutch cream and Sebagoes are the best

• Snow peas

• Sugar snap peas

• Sweetcorn

• Sweet potato

. Zucchini – excellent small zucchini available at the moment

ZUCCHINI FLOWERS STUFFED WITH FETA AND WHITE WINE BATTER – by Alison

Tips – If you open a bottle of wine mid week and don’t finish it take a freeze bag and freeze it and write across it “White White” . This is a great way of ensuring you have wine for cooking when you need it without opening a bottle especially

Ingredients:

Vegetable oil, to deep fry

140g feta  (try to go to the Farmers Market and get a local feta as it has so much flavor and you are supporting farmers who we rely on for the skills of traditional cheesemaking)

¼ cup parmesan, grated

2 Tbs thickened cream

6 zucchini flowers

1 cup plain flour

1/3 cup white wine

½ cup corn flour

Method:

Fill a saucepan half full with oil and place over a medium heat until hot enough to deep fry.

Combine the feta, parmesan and cream in a small bowl, season with salt and pepper. Spoon into a piping bag, pipe the mixture into the zucchini flowers and twist the flowers closed.

Place the flour, and white wine in a bowl, add a cup of water and using a whisk, whisk to make a batter.

Coat the zucchini flowers in corn flour, then carefully place in the hot oil. Cook for 2-3 minutes or until golden and crispy. Drain onto a plate lined with kitchen paper.   Sprinkle with salt to serve.

ALISON’S RAT (ATUILLE)

If you have some left over bread make it into breadcrumbs lay them on a tray with some olive oil on low heat to crunch them up and you can use this as a topping.  I also add some finely chopped rosemary and thyme from the garden which I have hung to dry.

5 red capsicum

70 ml olive oil

4 garlic cloves, thinly sliced –(please use local garlic)

1 onion, finely chopped

4 cups peeled and diced tomatoes -passata

800 gm eggplant (about 2), cut widthways into 5mm-thick slices

400 gm green zucchini, cut widthways into 5mm-thick slices

6 Roma tomatoes, thinly sliced horizontally

140 gm (2 cups) fresh coarse breadcrumbs or leftover bread finely chopped

100 gm finely grated cheddar or your choice hard cheese

2 tsp thyme leaves

Preheat oven to 180C. Place capsicum in a roasting pan, drizzle with 2 tsp olive oil and roast until skin is blistered (10-15 minutes). Transfer to a bowl, cover with plastic wrap and cool.  When cool, peel and remove seeds (discarding peel and seeds), thinly slice lengthways and set aside.

Meanwhile, heat 2 tbsp olive oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add garlic and onion and sauté until soft (5-7 minutes). Add tomatoes, season to taste and simmer, stirring occasionally to combine (4-5 minutes), then pour evenly into the base of a 3 litre-capacity deep baking dish.

Layer eggplant, overlapping slightly, over prepared base. Season to taste and repeat with zucchini and roast capsicum. Scatter anchovies over and finish with a layer of Roma tomatoes.

Combine breadcrumbs, cheddar or your choice of hard cheese and thyme in a bowl. Season to taste, then scatter over vegetables and drizzle with remaining olive oil. Pop in the oven and bake until top is golden about 55 minutes.

Alison Drover

FROM THE BELLY LAB

One other delicious thing in season this month is lychees, a bit of an odd up and down season this year, but there are quite a lot around at the moment.  Look out for small stone ones, a whole lot more flesh in even the small looking ones.   I had a lovely lychee martini in Brisbane recently, the best part was 3 frozen lychees on a stick as decoration/swizzle stick.  I took the idea back to the belly lab, and after much product testing, highly recommend to you…

LYCHEE CHOC TOPS

Peel and remove the stone from lychees, trying not to open them up too much.

Soak in a white spirit – white rum works well, vodka is drier and lets you taste the fruit more.  Skip for kids of course.

Freeze.  When frozen, coat in warm tempered chocolate and re-freeze.

Eat straight from freezer with great delight.

You could also experiment with filling the centre of the lychees with nuts, chocolate ganache, another fruit….too much is always good!

DANISH MARDI GRAS

Yes they are dancing in the streets in the biggest Carnival in the world today, in Rio, and all over Brazil and the Catholic world, celebrating life and love and rich food before we all get very serious and give up all animal products and sugar until Easter.

Most of us have heard of the Rio mardi gras, and the Sydney one, but have you heard about Danish mardi gras, or fastelavn?  It evolved out of the Catholic tradition, but as Denmark became mostly Protestant, it turned into “a time for children’s fun and family games” like whipping your parents.  It is celebrated the Sunday or Monday before Ash wednesday.

Some towns in Denmark hold  large Fastelavn  parades and festivities , including hitting a wooden effigy of a cat filled with sweets – which once used to contain an actual cat.

Of course there is a special food associated with Danish carnival, a sweet bun sometimes filled with cream.  It is made with potatoes, flour, egg, sugar and butter and deep fried.  Typical carnival food, sweet fried dough seems to be popular all over the world for mardi gras.

The other typical Danish tradition is a good flogging, now done mostly by children to wake up parents on the Sunday of fastelavn.  They use bunches of twigs or willow, decorated with sweets or feathers, egg-shells, storks and little figures of babies.  Apparently it started as a fertility ritual, when it was mainly the young women and the infertile who were flogged.  Then very pious parents would flog their kids to remind them of Christ’s suffering.  Now the kids get their revenge.  But the flogged ones always get a sweet bun in return.  If you are living at home with mum and dad, you could just go multicultural and be Danish for a day.

FASTELAVN BUNS – from this unadorned but great collection of Danish recipes, a lot from his mum, bless him.

* ½ pound potatoes

* 1 cup potato water

* 1 package dry yeast

* ½ cup water

* 2 cups flour — sifted

* 2 tablespoons soft butter

* 1 egg — beaten

* ¾ cup sugar

* ½ cup warm water

* 1 teaspoon salt

* 5 cups flour

Cook potatoes. Drain and reserve potato water. Mash potatoes. Mix mashed potatoes, potato water, yeast cake soaked in the 1/2 cup water, and the 2 cups flour. Let stand overnight.

In the morning add the butter, the egg and the sugar, and cream well. Add the lukewarm water, salt and the 5 cups flour. Beat well. Let rise in a warm place until doubled in size.

Punch down and roll ½ inch thick. Cut into rounds with a cookie cutter and drop each round into hot fat, browning on both sides. Remove and drain on paper towels.  Roll in sugar while still warm.

AND TO CELEBRATE 100 YEARS OF INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY

I played a few minutes from a couple of my favourite community radio food shows.  Because on community radio you can be involved no matter your gender, colour, sexual orientation or fanciability.

This is a story from the American network NPR, by those other fabulous sisters, the Kitchen Sisters, about an indomitable woman who fed and helped the black civil rights campaigners, including ML King.

And this is from the Melbourne station 3CR, a piece from their long running food show ‘Food Fight’.  If you are chasing up info on all the benefits of coffee grounds for your garden, or you are thinking of starting up a coffee grounds recycling system where you are, the website is http://groundtoground.org/

AND FINALLY …. sometimes it’s hard to believe belly only goes for one hour:

THE BELLY BULLETIN

CARE Australia is  launching the Walk In Her Shoes challenge  in celebration of the 100th year of International Women’s Day.  Women and girls make up 60 per cent of the 1.4 billion people currently living in poverty. Millions walk over six kilometres a day in search of food, water and firewood. This leaves little time for anything else.  So if you want to Help break this cycle of poverty, Walk 10,000 steps per day for one week and get sponsored – the week is Monday 28 March to Sunday 3 April 2011.
You can raise money towards firewood, water, food, health care, safety or education to reduce the burden.  Go to www.careaustralia.org.au for details.

In other news, the 2 big supermarkets are fighting over milk, Mallams has closed down in Mullum, but I’d rather tell you about life-saving honey, soggy pizza and breast milk ice cream.

Honey made from an Australian native myrtle tree has been found to have the most powerful anti-bacterial properties of any honey in the world and could be used to treat antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections that commonly occur in hospitals and nursing homes.   The myrtle is (leptospermum polygalifolium), which grows along the Australian eastern seaboard from the south coast of NSW to Cape York.  The honey is being tested by a Brisbane-based research group.  Meantime cover yourself in honey, it can’t hurt, just watch out for ants.

What does it take to break the  the record for the world’s longest pizza?   One-and-a-half tonnes of flour, 650 kilos of mozzarella, 1,500 litres of water, 30 or 40 kilos of salt and about 15 kilos of yeast, also one-and-a-half kilometres of chicken wire, and a special oven that can cook one-and-a-half metres of pizza per minute.
And no rain.  So maybe they never should have tried this in Melbourne, especially this year.
More than 40 chefs from Melbourne pizza restaurants were working since midnight last weekend on Lygon street, to make the 1.2-kilometre long pizza and were halfway through when rain-affected soggy dough brought the attempt to an end.
The pizza was going to be distributed to charities across Melbourne.
Judges from the Guinness World Records Association were there to decide if the pizza broke the previous record which is held by Poland.
Organisers say they might try again next year.

On my last belly show I told you about how popular baby food is with many adults.  Now you can go straight for the ultimate baby food.  A cafe in London has started selling ice cream made from women’s breast milk.  It is called Baby Gaga, and it’s made with milk expressed by 15 women who replied to an ad on an online mothers’ forum.  One of the milk donors, Victoria Hiley,  said that if adults realised how tasty breast milk was then more new mothers would feel happier about breastfeeding.  She expressed the milk at the cafe and it was pasteurised before lemon zest and vanilla pods were added as it was churned. Ms Hiley, is paid $23 for every 10 ounces of milk.
The man behind Baby Gaga icecream, Matt O’Connor, said he could not understand people being squeamish about the product. “If it’s good enough for our children, it’s good enough for the rest of us,” he said.  “Some people will hear about it and go yuck – but actually it’s pure organic, free-range and totally natural.”
Already a pretty good story, but now it’s much better because singer Lady Gaga has had her lawyer send a stern legal letter telling the ice-cream makers to : “cease and desist from in any other way associating with Lady Gaga any ice-cream you are offering,” .  The letter accuses The cafe of “taking unfair advantage of, and riding on the coat-tails of” Lady Gaga’s trademarks in a manner that is “deliberately provocative and, to many people, nausea-inducing”.
The ice-cream was a big hit. One serve costs $22.50 and it’s brought out by waitresses wearing flamboyant outfits, a bit of a  Lady Gaga trademark.  But breast milk icecream is now off the menu because Westminster City Council seized it for health and safety checks.  “We are taking the ice-cream away for samples,” a spokeswoman said.  “It’s not a ban. The owner has voluntarily agreed not to make any more or sell any more until we’ve got all the results.”  Breast milk could carry viral infections, including hepatitis, she explained.
The manufacturers have said they use the same screening procedures as blood donation centres or milk banks in London.

MUSIC

Still celebrating wonderful crazy community radio,  the tracks I played today were from a compilation done to support a Sydney community radio licence aspirant station that unfortunately never became permanent, Out Fm.

From “Inside Out”, Warner records 1999

authority over the fish –  by artificial

flowers in the sky – by boo boo and mace

miss del ray – by jo jo smith

love and chocolate cake, sister T