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Watch VideoGourmet Farmer
Matthew Evans
Ever wondered what it’d be like to leave an extremely cushy job in the city and try to set up a small farm without any experience of rural life apart from a luxury weekend farmstay in 1992? Join Matthew Evans as he adjusts from being Australia’s most feared restaurant critic to learning exactly where his food is coming from, on a farmlet in Tasmania’s beautiful Huon Valley.
Matthew Evans once trained as a chef before he crossed to the dark side of the industry and became a restaurant reviewer. After five years and 2000 restaurant meals as the chief reviewer for The Sydney Morning Herald, he came to the slow realisation that chefs don’t have the best produce in the land, normal people who live close to the land do. So he moved to Tasmania, to a small patch of earth where he’s raising pigs and sheep, milking a cow and waiting for his chickens to start laying.
Homemade Bacon
10 CommentsI’ve been experimenting a lot with pork. With dry curing and ageing of my prosciutto in the picker’s hut. With light curing of fresh pork for an hour and making pasta. With roasts and braises and stews and speck. And now, only a few months later than I originally planned, I’ve finally managed to smoke my own bacon from my own pigs.
Let Us Eat Cake
Cake. It’s a big part of country living. The making of it. The eating of it. The very idea of it.
Roadside Fruit Stalls
If you pass a roadside stall selling fruit at this time of year and don’t stop, you’re probably missing out. Not all of them are totally brilliant, but for every miss there are several hits; stalls selling just-picked berries that are so good they make me giggle like a schoolgirl.
How Not to Start a Fire
Cygnet isn’t a big town. But it does host a big folk festival, a joyous occasion where mobs of campers arrive carrying guitar cases and fiddles can be heard outside the Schoolhouse Café. I ventured down after getting home from the farmer’s market and listened to a girl and her guitar, and sat on the grass as the town centre resonated to a drum band.
Christmas and New Year on Puggle Farm
Christmas. A long table lunch. Great company. The two mates who make regular appearances in the show are there with extended families. Nick making sure the prawns are fantastic and the lobster fresh. Ross roasting a superb home-kill goose over several hours. And roasting it over the best goose-fat drenched potatoes, too. I make shortbread and mince tarts and a raspberry and rose geranium sherbet.
Water.
Everything needs it. The chooks. The pigs, for both drinking and a wallow. The cows. They need a lot, about 50 litres a day, by the look of the bath that they drink from straight outside the house block. The sheep need it, I need it to water the vegies and sprout the barley as feed.
The Boy and the Dyke
I feel like the boy with a hole in the dyke. Sure, the grass was long near the water tank. And yes, I was a bit close with the brush cutter. But I couldn’t have been that close. Could I?
Summer
Summer feels different down here. Not least because it doesn’t always crack the 20°C barrier in December. Which means that the seasons are a little out of whack. So right now I’m eating handfuls of raspberries. Lots of strawberries. Every day I’m getting broad beans from the garden, and the leafy greens are racing out of the ground. It’s like spring and summer combined.
Featured Recipes
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Fattoush
To keep cut radish from discolouring soak it in cold water until you are ready to assemble the salad.
Glossary
Baby Corn
Tiny tender ears of corn. Available both fresh and canned. They require little cooking and add more colour and texture than flavour.
