The bellysisters are happy members of the great sisterhood of substantial second helpings, and hopefully so are all our lovely listeners, people who love cooking eating and talking about good food.  On belly today, a story about food prices, and more food news at the end of the show.  But mostly I was talking with Brigitte Hendrix, a regular belly listener who loves to experiment with recipes, from the homey to molecular gastronomy, and who has lived and cooked and eaten from Mullumbimby to Umbria, and even on the high seas.

FOOD PRICES, or UGLY IS GOOD

It’s time to buy ugly food dear bellysisters!  Or discover local markets and independent shops.

We’ve all heard that the Queensland floods  will affect food prices.  At the height of the floods, when the Brisbane central market was closed because it was underwater, a friend of mine witnessed  ‘supermarket rage’ as some shoppers didn’t understand why prices had gone up and were abusing staff.
However, the Fairfax papers report that  “much of the produce from Queensland had already been picked and packed when the floods hit and the season there was drawing to its end. Fruit markets [are] more dependent on produce from Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania at this time of year. ..The price rises will be due to wet weather down south rather than what is happening up north…Vegetables such as beans, broccoli, and celery might rise in price because of heavy rains in Victoria”
Some Queensland crops such as watermelons and tomatoes have been destroyed, leading to large price rises in produce from other parts of Australia,  but  ”It’s the long-term story from Queensland that’s the issue. The early autumn crops need to be put in the ground now.”  Queensland traditionally supplies most of our autumn and winter fruit and veg.  The floods have also removed topsoil in some areas, decreasing productivity.  So expect price rises right now and for a while to come.  In a front page update today, the smherald reports increases in watermelons,sweet potatoes,broccoli, zucchini,bananas, capsicum, tomatoes, mangoes and lettuces.  Forecast shortages include lettuces, potatoes,chillies, corn and cabbage.  So if you have a veggy patch, or room for a few pots, it may be a good year to grow a few of those things yourself.  Lettuces, chillies, sweet potatoes and tomatoes are all very easy to grow at home in our climate, even if you don’t have much space.   At times local produce is more expensive than food trucked in from other parts of Australia, and this year the bad weather has caused shortages and price rises here too.  But mostly market growers, and shops that stock a lot of local items, keep the prices of local produce pretty steady.   So it may be a good idea to support them year round.

If you do shop at supermarkets, buy ugly fruit and veg!  Coles has started stocking blemished fruit, and Woolworths is considering it too, but is afraid of customer reactions.  So tell them to bring it on!  The alternative to ugly Australian fruit and veg this year is perfect looking imported produce, which the big chains are considering in order to keep those overflowing bins full.

A DELICIOUS LISTENER – BRIGITTE HENDRIX

Brigitte now lives in Mullumbimby, but grew up in Victoria, the daughter of a Dutch mother and German pastry maker father, who used to let her help out at the factory on weekends and go delivering pastries with him to a network of traditional German and European restaurants.  She got bored with Melbourne as a young woman and went off to Asia and Europe.  She spent quite a lot of her travelling years eating and cooking, including a stint as the on board cook on a beautiful old wooden tugboat.  The owners wandered the shores of the Mediterranean, especially Corsica and the South of France, and she remembers fondly the smells of the boat and discovering many wonderful food markets.  She believes most people love having simple food cooked for them, where you can still taste the original ingredients.
At the same time, she loves playing with food a’ la Heston Blumenthal, fun and theatre and lots of kitchen gadgets.  We had a little rave about gorgeous local natives, the finger limes, which are a molecular gastronomy experiment by mother nature.  She has lots of creative ideas from her travels and would love to get together with others locally to set up a different kind of space or catering company.

Brigitte developed this recipe to share on belly, because, as we’ve been saying, there is a lot of fruit around that either doesn’t look great or goes off quickly.

NOT SO FRESH BUT SUPER TASTY FRUIT JELLY

Take any stone fruit, e.g.; cherries, peaches,  nectarines, lychees.  And/or other
fruits you might have such as  pineapple, apples, grapes, anything that
is wrinkly or not so tasty or just needs to be used  rather than thrown out.
More or less a kilo of fruit.

Roughly chunky chop everything (minus seeds) and place in  a heavy
pot.

Add one star anise ,cinnamon quill,anything else you like.
Add one cup juice {whatever you have} I like cherry.
Add half a cup brown sugar. Stir .
Bring to boil; spoon out half cup of juice and place in cup with  *2
sheets of gelatine till syrupy.
Then place back in pot and STIR .
I also like to add a dessert spoon of ghee this makes it glossy and
creamy. STIR till a lovely glossy rich thick consistency.
Pour into serving dish, allow to cool, place in fridge.
Serve when cold and firm.

*I’ve always had a problem with using gelatine and have now found
the one my mum uses (Rheingold schnell-losliche), so far it works
beautifully for me.

A FEW FAVOURITE THINGS

My favourite cookbook is Good Housekeeping (Step by step cookbook).
I got this book in 1993 and it has absolutely every recipe known in the
West. It’s so easy and everything works.  It has taught me the basic ground
rules and from that I’m able to experiment and elaborate.

My favourite food is kangaroo meat which is a beautiful lean healthy
clean meat; hazelnut ice-cream dreamy.  Healthy, top quality chocolate, nothing
more necessary; coffee yoghurt; great cleanser, and Italian cheese cake, decadent  and rare to find a good one  . My mouth’s watering.  And my favourite drink is Coopers vintage stout (no longer available).  Real milk (Dutch) and iced fresh mint mineral water with finger limes and Stevia.

Brigitte

THE BELLY BULLETIN

Fairfax papers have launched an investigation into rorts and fraud by the buyers for Coles and Woolworths supermarkets, which control 70% of the grocery market.
Bill Harvey, Woolworths’ national buyer for coffee, tea and sugar, was detained by police on Friday.  Food wholesalers pay so called ”promotional surcharges” of between 15 and 20 per cent to have their products stocked by Woolworths.
A big pot of money, which leads to temptations. It is alleged that Mr Harvey, who has a salary of about $150,000 a year, took a percentage of the promotional fees from coffee and tea suppliers who wanted to get their products on to Woolworths shelves.  In cash.  Possibly in little brown envelopes.
In similar cases, in October last year Woolworths dismissed three buyers from its fresh produce department after a tip-off that it was paying up to $20 per box too much for parsnips. Of all things.  And in 2006 Coles sacked an executive for a secret deal over lamb supplies.  The supermarkets and the sacked execs in these 2 cases deny allegations of criminal intent.  According to the blog www.insideretailing.com.au, Woolworths also had to bring criminal charges over 2 meat buyers a few years ago.
More tipoffs are welcome, to mhawthorne@theage.com.au

Another pest to watch out for is ‘Myrtle rust’.  According to the NSW department of Primary Industries Myrtle Rust  is a newly described fungus.  It affects a lot of locally grown plants and has recently been spotted in wholesale nurseries in Byron Bay and Alstonville according to the ABC, also from the NSW Central Coast to Queensland.  It affects, among others, a lot of lovely native food plants, like lemon myrtle, aniseed myrtle, native guava, rose apple and riberry, so the public is asked to inspect and report any infestation, as it may also spread into the bush.
Myrtle Rust is distinctive, as it produces masses of powdery bright yellow or orange-yellow spores on infected plant parts. It causes lesions on young actively growing leaves, shoots, flower buds and fruits. Leaves may become buckled or twisted or die.  Infection on highly susceptible plants may result in plant death.  More info, photos and how to deal with suspect plants, here.

Still on plants, if your chilli bushes, like mine, are either refusing to fruit, or the chillies are going from ripe to rotten in record time, spare a thought for the chilli addicts of Indonesia.  Chili prices have multiplied fivefold in Indonesia over the past year to around Rp 100,000 ($11) a kilogram, making it more expensive than beef.  Many people there cannot give up a chilli sambal and are cutting back on other food instead.  Chilli production has fallen because of excessive rains and the volcanic eruptions of Mount Merapi.  As a short-term solution to the chilli prices, Agriculture Minister Suswono said he was preparing a national campaign to encourage people to plant chilies. He said free seeds would be distributed to 100,000 households.  The government is also  moving to introduce new regulation making it easier to secure land for agriculture.  One comment to the story, from “Mamaku” complained of the large “amount of farm lands changing into real estates, malls or state highways.”  Sound familiar?

Some good news now.  The fishing season for Southern bluefin tuna in the great Australian Bight has just started.  Fishing crews are reporting massive increases in fish numbers, possibly as a result of quotas  imposed in the 1980s by the main fishing nations Australia, Japan and New Zealand.  Southern bluefin tuna is listed as a critically endangered species, and not recommended as a sustainable fish choice, but maybe there is hope that populations are recovering.  Fishermen out of Port Lincoln in South Australia report numbers not seen in 25 years, and a good range of sizes and ages.  So the fiftieth tuna festival in Port Lincoln should be a happy event.  It’s on right now until January 26.  The centerpiece is a tuna tossing competition, which now involves a fake fish so as not to waste tuna.  And for the kids, a prawn tossing comp.  The world record toss of 37.23 metres was set in 1998.

And finally,the Australian Bureau of Statistics says that we are drinking less beer.  At the start of the 1960s, beer made up more than 75% of all the  alcohol we consumed.  Now beer is at 44 per cent.  Wine consumption has tripled to 36 per cent and spirit has almost doubled to 20 per cent over that time.
Australia’s peak per capita alcohol consumption was in the mid-1970s.  We drank an average of 13 litres of pure alcohol  per person per year.  That dropped to under 10 litres in the mid-1990s, but has since risen to nearly 10.5 litres, or 2.3 standard drinks, per person per day.  But the ABS admits that it overestimates consumption, because alcohol used in cooking, and waste are also included.  Which is a relief.

The belly bulletin today was sourced from ABC online, Fairfax papers, the Jakarta Globe and belly informers in your community and online, and brought to you by sister T.

EDIBLE QUOTE

Baron Lamington: “Those bloody poofy woolly biscuits”- Baron Lamington was governor of Queensland in the late 1800s when government house cooks, to feed unexpected guests, improvised by rolling stale cake in icing & coconut.  He obviously did not appreciate his name being linked to them – you never know what you will be remembered by, but it could be worse than a sweet that brought so many smiles, and dollars to charities all over Oz.

MUSIC

Claude Hay, Get me some, from  “Get me some”

Kate Rowe, Coffee my Lover, from Nature’s Little Game

Jazzerati, Cafe le Bop, from Live at Pix records

Mo Horizons, Pa Ma Estrada

Kristi Stassinopolou, Waves, from Nu Europe

love, chocolate cake and ugly fruit,

sister T