It was a cool autumn morning on Marlu, the mist sieving through the trees, and the sky is dark and bruised. Perfect morning for a brisk walk with my dog “Scout”.

As I crossed the paddock I noticed a hind and her yearling quietly grazing beside a fence that borders Marlu from the forest. Sambar Deer are a very large deer. A mature stag can stand 130cm at the shoulder and weigh up to 230kg. The hinds are smaller in size and stand up to 110cm and weigh up to 180kg. They are dark brown with course hair and ginger light brown undercarriage. Originally imported from Malaysia, India and Sri Lanka they have become a subject of great controversy given their massive numbers and environmental damage. But they are great eating!

Sambar are very cautious creatures, with a keen sense of hearing and smell, their two greatest defence mechanisms. The hind heard me and within a split second had cleared the fence and disappeared into the forest. The yearling ran backwards and forwards along the fence and not looking where it was going ran straight into a tree and dropped down dead.

Scout and I were astonished, that was not the kind of thing that happens every day. Never one to miss an opportunity, I went for the tractor.

Sambar need to be bled, so I strung the poor beast up in a tree and left it overnight.

The following day my friend Ian came round to do the butchering, far more experienced than me, I would have made a botch of it. He cut the backstraps out and the legs. These I hung in the shed for a week under hessian.

A week later we reconvened to finish the butchering. Ian dressed the leg as shown below.

I cut the backstraps into schnitzel fillets, beat them flat, crumbed them in panko and froze them. The schnitzels were absolutely delicious, pink/white flesh, delightful sweet flavour. I served them with cooked cabbage with caraway. It was the gift that kept giving, for months we dined on delicious venison at least once a week.

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Crumbed Venison Schnitzel with Caraway Cabbage

Delicious wild game schnitzel. The perfect winter comfort food!

Course Main Course

Cuisine Mediterranean

Keyword cabbage, caraway, crumbed, recipe, schnitzel, venison

Prep Time 40 minutes

Cook Time 20 minutes

Total Time 1 hour

Servings 2

Calories 260kcal

Ingredients

• 2 200g Venison fillets
• 1 free range egg beaten
• 1 cup Panko breadcrumbs
• 1 tsp sweet paprika
• 2 tbsp cold water
• 1/4 cup unbleached plain white flour
• 1/2 tsp maldon or kosher salt
• 1/2 tsp cracked black pepper
• 1/2 savoy cabbage shredded
• 2 cloves garlic crushed
• 1 small brown onion diced
• 1 tsp caraway seeds
• 1/4 cup water or stock
• 1 tsp cracked black pepper
• 1 tsp maldon or kosher salt
• 1 tbsp cider vinegar
• 1 cup olive or grapeseed oil
• 1 knob butter

Instructions

• Place seasoned flour in a bowl, beaten egg in another bowl and panko tossed with paprika in another bowl
• Coat venison with flour, then egg then pat with panko thickly all over and rest in refrigerator covered for up to 2 hours.
• Meanwhile heat 2 tablespoons of oil in heavy saucepan and fry onion and garlic for 4-5 minutes until slightly browned. 
• Add cabbage and stir until combined. Add caraway and stir. Put lid on and turn heat down to simmer for 15 minutes stirring frequently. Season to taste.
• Heat remaining oil and butter in fry pan until 190c-375f
• Shallow fry venison until crumb is golden. Turn and fry other side. Be careful not to overcook, you want it golden not brown.
• Place cooked venison on paper towel to drain
• To serve place venison on plate and spoon cabbage beside. Yum!

Notes

Venison Schnitzel Recipe with Cabbage and Caraway

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Roast Wona Pigeon with root vegetables on a bed of polenta

The Wonga Pigeon is a large ground dwelling native Australian pigeon with a delicious fat breast and the most annoying call imagineable. It repetitively coos for hours on end and when flushed takes off with loud wing claps. They are also very tasty.

Gould image of Wonga Pigeon

Early settlers held the Wonga in great esteem, likening it to the wood pigeon of “home” and hunted it mercilessly. They were also shot to protect crops and being ground dwellers their numbers have decreased due to fox and cat predation. Whilst they do not hold endangered status they are protected. Word has it they are delicious eating.

Recipe from Mrs Maclurcan’s Cookery Book circa 1903

The other day, I happened to be in the garden enjoying my morning coffee when the serenity was shattered by a load crash. A hapless Wonga had flown at full speed into one of our upstairs windows, and was prone on the verandah roof in its death throes.

Pidgeon should be plucked and eaten straight away, and if the bird is still warm, the plucking will be very easy. I placed the bird in a baking dish beside the kitchen sink with a plastic bag in the sink. Carefully I plucked the breast feathers, then cut and removed the wings, legs and severed the head at the base of the neck. All of this was discarded into the plastic bag. I was also careful to remove all the remaining quills. Using my index and forefinger I removed the gut and organs and then washed the bird and patted it dry. The entire process  took less than five minutes.

Living in Jamieson requires the cook to be innovative given it is a 70km round trip to the nearest grocery store. A quick rummage through the crisper revealed a couple of beetroot, half a bulb of fennel and a yellow capsicum. I roasted these then the pidgeon and served the lot on a bed of crisp friend polenta.

After plucking and gutting the bird I cooked some polenta for a base, roasted whatever vegetables I had in the fridge and served it for lunch with nice glass of Pattriti Wines Saparavi from the Barossa Valley.

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Tofu Steak with wild mushroom ragout

My carnivorous friend Bob Hart will never forgive me for this, but there are times when I would prefer to chow down on the bean rather than the bovine, mind you in our household it is mostly the latter. The curd of soy bean milk, Tofu first appeared in China over 2,000 years ago and its use rapidly spread across Asia. To coagulate the soy milk, the Chinese used lushui, which is magnesium chloride. The Japanese call this Nigari. One can only wonder how this technique was first invented, what possessed some person to juice a bean and then add the grey stuff that dripped from hessian bags of sea salt to thicken it into a curd, press it and then cook it? Almost as absurd as cheese. And then some bright spark worked out that it was ideal for de-icing highways. What a versatile thing.  The price varies depending on the packaging. If you want it to put on your driveway it is around $20 a tonne. If you want it to curdle your tofu, City Organics in Hobart sell it online for around $16 a kilo.

Bob Hart warns me that eating tofu could shrink my brain. Sound ridiculous? Well perhaps not. A study of 3,734 elderly Japanese-American men in Hawaii found exactly that. Men that consumed Tofu more than twice weekly were shown to suffer more cognitive impairment. Perhaps that is why my brain doesn’t recall as well as it did once. The other problem with soy products is the way they are farmed.

Conventionally farmed soy can contain high levels of phytoestrogens and zinc-blocking phytic acid, plus additional neurotoxic compounds such as dieldrin, aluminium, fluoride and cadmium. A good dose of that can really spoil your day, so I would buy organic if I were you. And I won’t even start on infant formulas which nowadays contain lots of soy.

However gentle reader, it is not my intention to put you off tofu. It is a versatile ingredient, has a great texture and readily absorbs other flavours. The following is a really easy quick mid week meal. I served it last night with caramelised roast beet with fetta and a salad of radicchio, fennel and rocket with a grenadine dressing.

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Japanese maple outside Jamieson Post Office

View over the town from the Jamieson arboretum, a community project commenced in early 1990s

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Cannelini Beans with White Anchovy Salad

Looking for something to do with my preserved lemons, which have been nicely maturing under the stairs, I made the following salad, a variation on the traditional spanish fennel and preserved lemon salad

Love to serve this with one of those wonderful $9.95 Chemin Des Papes Cotes du Rhone Rose

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Spicy Tomato Capsicum and Chilli Salad Recipe

This salad shows off the essence of the capsicum, combining roasted red peppers,  chill and paprika with juicy ripe summer tomatoes.

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For some reason last night I came down with an insatiable craving for Umami, the so called  fifth flavour (after sweet, sour, bitter and salty). Umami was enjoyed by the Romans, who used their Garum (fermented fish sauce) to add Umami and salt to thier dishes, and given its pungent odour, imposed strict sanctions under law against the indiscriminate placement of Gurum factories. Escoffier was famous for his use of Umami, although he was conscious of the flavour, but not the science.  Kaiser Wilhelm was reputed to have once said to Escoffier, “I am the Emperor of Germany, but you are the Emperor of Chefs.”  But I digress gentle reader.

In 1866, a German chemist named Karl Heinrich Leopold Ritthausen uncovered Glutamic acid. In 1908 Kikunae Ikeda, a Japanese chemist discovered the component that produces the flavour of seaweed, tomatoes and meat, which was glutamate.  He detected the chemical root, named the taste sensation Umami and patented Monosodium Glutamate. Yes, good old magic powder, MSG. Business boomed, and the resulting commercial empire, the Ajinomoto Co. today produces 33% of the worlds MSG.  As a sideline they acquired the rights to Aspartame from Monsanto in 2000 for $67,000,000. The company is active in 100 countries, employs nearly 25,000 people and earns around $9 Billion per anum.

Soon after Ikeda uncovered glutamate, a student of his, Professor Shintaro Kidama was fiddling around with dried bonito and uncovered another umami chemical, the ribonucleotide IMP. The great leap forward came in 1957, when Akira Kuninaka discovered  another ribonucleotide, GMP in shitake mushrooms. He studied the synergy between IMP, GMP and MSG and came up with TASTY.  It was basically a scientific explanation as to why some things taste so good when combined. For example Parmesan with Tomato, tomato sauce with beef, the classic mirepoix with beef stock, dashi, swiss gruyere with beef stock in french onion soup, anchovies with parmesan in Caesar salad. The list goes on and on.

Why I had such a craving for umami is more complex. Other cravings are easier to explain. For example, humans are hardwired to crave sugar, which along with other carbs stimulates the release of the feel good brain chemical seratonin. Salt carvings are curiously often caused by dehydration, not drinking enough, or perhaps too much…Sodium aids the body in fluid retention. Psychologist and author of “The Shangri La Diet”  Seth Roberts, who is also an obsessive blogger http://blog.sethroberts.net , reckons that Umami is the minds way of healing the body. He hypothesises that our bodies naturally crave umami in order to tricking us into eating bacteria -that we need regular immune stimulation to be in optimal health and long ago, when we evolved, we got that stimulation from bacteria in our food.

Whatever it was I went into overdrive in the kitchen, and last night as the cool air flowed down the valley extinguishing the heat of the day we dined on Portugese Grilled Chicken, a chili tomato and roast capsicum salad and a white anchovy and white bean salad.

Quick Grilled Portugese Chicken Recipe

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Preserved lemons

The lemon tree in the front of my garden has been nurtured for ten years. For the first few winters I lovingly covered it with shade cloth to protect it from the frost. In summer I watered it daily, religiously pissing on it whilst keeping a weather eye out for morning walkers – or approaching vehicles – which occasionally resulted in an alarming case of urina interruptus. I fed my Eureka twice yearly, once in spring and again in late summer, a few weeks earlier than recommended given the sub alpine climate here in Jamieson that results in early frosts.  For five years the poor thing struggled, but then it started to bear fruit. As each season came and went more and more fruit appeared, until a couple of years ago I achieved my goal – a year round supply of delicious, juicy lemons within ten meters of my kitchen door.

Last spring the air was heady with the intoxicating scent of lemon blossoms and clouds of bees worked the tree’s pollen for weeks, and as summer came the tree became heavy with fruit. Fruit production for the first time overtook kitchen usage, supply exceeded demand. Something had to give. In high winds an overladen branch snapped and fell to the ground, followed by another a day later. A third of the tree gone in just 48 hours! The lemons I picked from the fallen branches filled three empty cardboard wine boxes, which I gave to the Jamieson General Store to accompany their excellent fish and chips.

The rest of the tree had to be thinned lest all the branches snapped. What a great excuse for topping up the larder with one of the most versatile and easy to prepare staples – Preserved Lemons.

The lemon is thought to have been first grown in Asia, and its ancestral species are supposedly the pummelo, the citron and the mandarin. They first appeared in Europe during Roman times and were introduced to Persia around 700 AD. Whilst preserved lemons are found in many cuisines around the world, they are best associated with Morocco. It was the Berbers who introduced the tagine and couscous, the Arabs who brought in spices, the Moors citrus, but it was the Jewish Moors who gazumped the lot and introduced the advanced pickling techniques that gave rise to Moroccan Preserved Lemons.

I love to cook with preserved lemons. Whilst the preserving takes a good deal of the sharpness from the lemon, it creates a whole new full lemon flavour. In my book Oceans – Recipes and Stories from the Coast I included a recipe for bonito with the sublime combination of saffron, ginger, tomato, coriander and preserved lemon. I love preserved lemons on top of pizza with minced lamb, pine nuts, coriander and yoghurt. They go tremendously with bean salads, or simply tossed in a parsley and mint salad with a simple dressing. Buy them in a shop and expect to pay…too much. Make them at home simply and easily.

The finished jars ready to go onto storage for a month.

Recipe: Preserved Lemons

Summary: An easy way to preserve lemons

Ingredients

• • Lemons

 

• • Salt

 

• • Lemon Juice

 

• • Bay Leaves

 

• • Chilli Peppers

 

• • Star Anise (Optional)

 

• • Corriander seed (Cilantro) (Optional)

 

• Saffron (Optional)

Instructions

1. Wash lemons to remove any dirt and dry with tea towel.
2. Sterilise glass jars by placing clean dry jar in oven and bake at 125C for 20 minutes. Remove and allow to cool
3. Cut lemons vertically leaving 1cm at base intact
4. Pack lemons with salt – about 1 tablespoon per lemon
5. Pack lemons into sterlised glass jars tightly, it is OK to force them, until jar is full
6. Juice enough juice to cover
7. Add any herbs or spices
8. Seal with greaseproof paper and lid
9. Store in cool dark place for four weeks

Quick notes

Ensure lemons remain submerged whilst curing. If a white mould appears on any surfaced lemons, scrape it away and resubmerge, it is harmless.

Preparation time: 1 hour(s)

Cooking time:

Diet type: Vegetarian

Diet tags: Low calorie, Reduced fat, Reduced carbohydrate, Gluten free, Raw

Culinary tradition: Middle Eastern

Calories: 5

Fat: 0

Protein: 0

My rating 5 stars:  ★★★★★ 1 review(s)

Lemons cut and packed with salt ready to be jarred.

Lemons soaking in the basin in water prior to salting

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Was uploading some panoramas I took in the outback to the diamantina-tour.com.au website yesterday and thought I would share them with you here as well.

Breaden Hills Canning Stock Route

This image was taken at sunset at the Breaden Hills, which are around 100kms south of the northern end of the Canning Stock Route. The area is within the Southesk Tablelands, named by the explorer David Carnegie after his father the 7th Earl of Southesk. The hills hold significance to Aboriginal people, and contain stone tool sites, waterholes, a stone hunting hide and some petroglyphs. There was plenty of humidity in the air, and there was lightning about the tablelands. I was preparing dinner when the range lit up, so I grabbed the camera. My expedition to the Canning is here.

Sunset reflections on the flooded Cooper floodplain at Etadunna

In 2011 the Cooper had crossed the Birdsville Track, an event that only occurs every twenty odd years. We were heading down towards the mouth and camped in the horse paddock on Etadunna, right on the banks. The cacophony of birdsong was almost deafening as I wandered down to get a shot of the sunset. I returned to this very spot in May 2012 and it was a dusty clay pan, dry as a chip.

Flooded Lake Cohen in the Gibson Desert.

Lake Cohen is an ephemeral wetland in the middle of the Gibson Desert Nature Reserve. It is really a giant clay pan that regularly holds a sheet of water. It is an important wayside stop for migratory birds. There is no water for miles around, and it is about as remote a place in Australia as you can get, almost directly between Newman and Alice Springs.

Looking out of Balgo Pound, a view to take your breath away

The Balgo Pound is one of the most spectacular breakaways in outback Australia, the flat spinifex plains of the Tanami Desert are broken by a spectacular laterite escarpment, the views take your breath away. We had been travelling for days up a track that doesn’t appear on any maps from Lake Mackay on the NT/WA border and suddenly arrived at the pound.

Vehicles descending on a steep track in the Sir Frederick James Range

The Frederick James Range is half way up the Sandy Blight Junction Road, a track put in by road builder and surveyor Len Beadell in 1963 as part of a network of roads for the Woomera Long Range Weapons testing program. Consisting of alluvial conglomerate, there is a steep 4X4 track to the summit. The view that awaits is astonishing. In this panorama you can see in the far distance the Peterman Range, with Lake Hopkins in the foreground. Though not in the photo, when we were there to the left we could see Mt Liebler in the Kintore Ranges, meaning the entire 380km Sandy Blight Junction track was visible from the top of this range.

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But this morning I wait in great anticipation for a celestial event that only occurs in a pattern that repeats every 243 years. We await the Transit of Venus, when Venus as a tiny black dot will move across the face of the sun. There have only been six transits observed since it was first discovered in 1639, and the next one won’t occur until 2117, by which time I will be well gone. Today will be perfect for viewing, not a breath of wind or a cloud in the sky.

The transit in progress

One of my travelling companions is Michael Welland, a geologist and popular science author. His book Sand, published by Oxford University Press is essential reading for anyone who loves deserts. I have decreed that he is geologist in residence and Chief Astronomer, and when I climb out of the swag he is already setting up tripods and lenses. I plan to use my welding mask to view it, as staring into the sun without it would cause blindness, a fate which befell the explorer John MacDouall Stuart, who would take sextant sightings at midday using the angle of the sun to determine his position.

Viewing the transit

As the light increases on the horizon the shadow of the earth glows a deep purple in the western sky. In minutes the sun breaks the horizon and throws a fiery orange light across the camp. We cast long shadows across the tessellations on the clay. The literature has told me that the transit will start before dawn in Western Australia, but when I hold the mask to the sun, I see nothing. Eventually, when the sun is just cresting the trees I spot it. First contact!  A tiny black dot at around 7 oclock on the dial of the fiery orb. My first thought is how tiny Venus is. I see it every day as the morning star, at the moment sitting next to Jupiter just before dawn every day, looking like a fat bright star. But against the sun, all the reflective light is gone, and it is so much smaller. But even more I am struck by the historical significance of what I am watching. James Cook was sent to Tahiti to observe the 1769 transit. His search for the great southern land was only a secondary consideration. Georgian England was in a fervour of scientific discovery. It was surmised that by observing the transit from different locations on earth, the distance from the earth to the sun, known as the astronomical unit, could be determined, and by using Keplar’s third law of planetary motion the size of the solar system could be determined. I find it astonishing that in 1769, the Crown would find this information so important that it would command its navy to dispatch ships on such an expensive and dangerous mission in the name of science. Kind of lucky they did, because I may not be here today watching this transit. Here on this claypan in the middle of nowhere (or the centre of the universe depending on your perspective) I feel a connnection to Cook, who watched this same event 240 odd years ago. It is a magic moment. Life is good!

Chief astronomer Michael Welland hard at it

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