Today on belly Amir Zikhron from Baraka Foods took us on a journey around the hommous restaurants of Israel, and encouraged us to be a lot more adventurous with how we eat hommous. Sister T and Sister D explored some great fruit and veg in season in March, as we enjoy a beautiful start to autumn with plenty of ripe tomatoes, eggplant, and other fruit and fruity vegetables. Sister T and bayfm listener Melissa make the best ever dragonfruit granita. Kale is everywhere, from Hollywood to Paris to New Brighton. And Karin Ochsner shares her enthusiasm for Co-op Kulcha, the food coop on the Byron Arts and Industry Estate that is already 11 months old.
CO-OP KULCHA
To find out a whole lot about Kulcha Jam and Co-op Kulcha, check out http://www.kulchajam.org/
Or listen to this interview, recorded last week at the end of another day at co-op Kulcha, with Sister T and Karin
The coop is going well, but they need more volunteers, especially if you are available on a Thursday. And it sounds like a great place to pick up new skills and meet interesting people, not just a way to lower your food bills.
FROM THE BELLY LAB – MELISSA'S GRANITA : PEPPER, LIME & DRAGONFRUIT RECIPE
[recipe by Tess Corino aka Sister Tess]
We invented this granita walking around the New Brighton Farmers Market on a hot morning in late February. It turned out even better than we hoped. Make sure you taste it before you freeze it, and maybe as it starts to freeze, to make sure you have a good balance of sweet/sour/spicy. White dragonfruit can be a bit bland but this combination brings it to life, or at least it provides a very decorative background to the other flavours.
1/2 cup sugar
2 large white dragonfruit
fresh (as in just off the vine) peppercorns to taste
juice of 2-4 limes to taste
Make a sugar syrup by melting the sugar (or less if your fruit is sweet or you just want a less sweet granita) in one cup of water over medium heat. Cool.
Peel and mash the dragonfruit by hand, with a fork or maybe a potato masher, so as to retain the black seeds. This will give you a beautiful white granita speckled with white just like the original fruit.
Grind the peppercorns well with a mortar and pestle. In season (just finishing) you can find fresh pepper at some of our farmers markets, or try frozen or fresh in Asian food stores. They keep well frozen at home too.
Mix together, don't add all of the syrup and of the lime juice at once in case you need to adjust for taste. If you aren't sure of the amount of pepper, you can always add a little on top of each serving, or serve it separately.
Pour into a wide, metal or ceramic container that fits flat in your freezer. Mix and later scrape with a fork as it freezes until it is a uniform grainy (granita) consistency.
Cover, keep frozen. Use within a day or two as a light dessert or refreshing snack on a hot day.
BELLY BULLETIN
The Conversation is a website that promises "academic rigour, journalistic flair". Check out an article by Professor John Mathews of Macquarie Uni, called "Tomatoes watered by the sea". As any gardener would know, salt water isn't very good for most plants. But in South Australia a company is experimenting an integrated system for growing vegetables like tomatoes and cucumbers in greenhouses, powered by the sun and sea water. A solar plant desalinates the water and provides electricity for heating and cooling. Integrating all the elements means that the whole system is much more efficient. It is a possible solution for providing fresh vegetables in remote, coastal but arid areas of the world. Both the use of greenhouses and the dry and distant locations mean that minimal pesticides can be used. See theconversation.com
And on modern trends…This has probably been happening here for a long time, but I've never seen it. My friend Paul's niece Casey works in a Sydney cafe, and is seeing many young Asian clients who order by calling up images their friends have
taken on Instagram and such social media sites of go-to dishes and pointing to them without looking at the menu.
Northern Rivers Food is looking for a volunteer Marketing, Communications and Events Intern at Northern Rivers Food 1-2 days per week for three months.
The successful applicant will gain valuable exposure to many of the Northern Rivers Food networks. Email info@northernriversfood.org.au
Northern Rivers Foods, in its regular newsletter, also notes that the Telstra Business awards are now open for nomination, so if you have a favourite food business in the area, why not nominate them and give them a chance at lots of publicity and prizes. And bring attention to our whole area. Meantime congratulations to macadamia producer Brookfarm for winning Silver at Royal Melbourne Fine Foods Awards for their Toasted Muesli. And to our own bellysister Ilias the Greek who, quote "set the Canberra foodies on fire with a series of cooking demonstrations as part of the recent Canberra Food and Wine Expo".
The Harvest Festival, planned for this autumn to showcase and celebrate some of our wonderful food producers, has been cancelled for this year as the organisers, being food producers themselves, just have too much on to co-ordinate all the satellite events. So the inaugural Harvest Festival, a week of farm tours, lunches, dinners and more, will happen in Autumn next year. If you are interested in participating, check out the article by Michael Dlask of Salumi Australia on the December 2 belly post.
MORE COMING
