The Dirty Chef

by Matthew Evans

  Within a week or two Hedley would come out on chores with us. If I had to milk the cow and Sadie was out, I’d set his bassinet down on the shelf next to the tools. When he was older, he’d watch intently from his pram as we brought the cow in, drained her udder and let her out. He’d sit, patiently for the most part, as we fed the pigs or moved the sheep. The first true sound he uttered was the baa-ing of a lamb rather than one of the words we expected him to parrot. Neighbours reckoned they’d see him playing happily in his pram when they walked past, looking seemingly abandoned, with his parents busy on the farm elsewhere—a gurgling, playful child rugged up against the cold, waiting on Mum or Dad to blow his nose and take him in, or move the pram to the next outdoor project.

  We were living the dream. Eating as much food grown locally as we could and a large proportion from our place. Our boy had only had raw milk, not pasteurised. He had eaten pork produced without growth promotants. He ate honest-to-goodness, home-killed free-range chicken. Grass-fed beef and lamb. But, and you may call this karma, he became a very, very fussy eater.

  When Hedley started chewing solid food, he liked pasta. He liked cheese on his pasta. But only parmesan and only if it had passed through the ‘right’ grater. And he would refuse to eat the pasta if he could see tomato or meat, and would go into a meltdown if there was anything vaguely green on it. Sadie and I spent more hours than we could count stuffing tiny bits of vegetable into penne to give him our version of a balanced diet. And although he liked cheese on his pasta, he refused to eat cheese any other way.

  Yes, laugh if you like, the restaurant reviewer got the fussy eater. Hedley didn’t like tomato sauce. He was nonplussed by sausages. He chose not to eat anything resembling meat for a while, despite having learnt to chew lamb off the bone when he was relatively little. He didn’t like peaches, even if they were peeled. He’s still like that today. He won’t eat apricots or plums. Apples and pears he’s usually okay with (thank the lord), but I don’t recall him eating beans, eggplant, mushrooms, zucchini, cauliflower or peas (except from the pod in the garden—once). Give him a pizza and he won’t eat the tomato. Or the cheese. Or anything that resembles a topping. All he really wants is the crust, and not too crusty either, please, Daddy.

  It took a year to convince him to eat mash. Only now can I get him to eat roasted potatoes, by calling them chips (he discovered fish and chips one day when we were travelling and there was no other choice for his tucker). He’s not that keen on the fish in fish and chips either, but he’ll put up with it for the chips. He loves tinned tuna, and doesn’t believe it’s fish, and he won’t eat fresh flathead or Striped Trumpeter. Hedley detests macaroni cheese but will eat rice crackers (ugh). He just about wets himself when he sees spongy bread, a far cry from the dark-crusted wholemeal sourdough we make, which is more likely to make your gums bleed than your child happy. Apparently.

  We grow a lot of things at home these days, but paddy fields, well, they’re not really on the cards in temperate southern Tasmania. So Hedley learnt to like rice, of course, perhaps just to spite me. Simple steamed rice, with butter or oil perhaps. And, on a good day, tinned tuna.

  While I had a terrific childhood, running around the hills behind our house in Canberra, I do feel as though the start we’ve given Hedley is one I would’ve wanted even more. He doesn’t spend as much time trapped in cars in traffic as he probably would’ve in a city. He has wide-open spaces and farm animals and fresh air and all the adventures a free-range kid could want. He’s adventurous in the great outdoors without being so fearless as to cause us conniptions.

  We don’t let him routinely watch television, either, because when we tried it, it made him a worse person to be around. But we do let him watch some shows as a treat. Usually they’re animated kids’ shows on DVD, though he watched season two of Gourmet Farmer with us; it was shown at 7.30, his normal bedtime, and the only chance we get to see the show in its final form is when it goes live to air. (I even had to buy the first season on DVD because I missed an episode and it wasn’t part of my contract to get a copy for free.) It’s an odd thing seeing yourself on television and not one I enjoy. Hedley, however, seemed very excited seeing himself on the small screen. Maybe the big head they saw on the prenatal ultrasound was the image of his ego (some might say, unkindly, like his dad). He probably thinks most families watch part of their lives played back on Thursday nights. I guess those who own a video camera and make family movies possibly do.

  Hedley is wont to stay up late in summer, the long, long days playing havoc with his biorhythms. It gets dark here, totally dark, about 10.30 pm on the longest day. Hardly the best time of year to try and get your boy to sleep early. So one day, when there was a show on telly that Sadie and I wanted to watch and it was nearly 8.30 pm, instead of going through the half-hour bedtime ritual, and missing half the show, we thought we’d simply let Hedley watch it. You won’t ruin your child’s mind by letting him see Downton Abbey, we reasoned.

  ‘If you want, you can stay up a little longer, and watch some telly,’ I told him. ‘It’s grown-up television,’ I added, so we could avoid another request for Octonauts or Shaun the Sheep.

  ‘Grown-up television?’ he cried, aghast, as he cast himself face-first into the couch. ‘But I HATE Gourmet Farmer.’ It was, apparently, the only grown-up television he’d ever seen.

  Apart from being forced to watch Gourmet Farmer, our child is having, in our eyes, this wonderfully romantic upbringing. Surrounded by nature, by livestock, by the great outdoors and all the fun that entails. We take him out in the kayaks. We put him on our backs when we go to see Australia’s only true native deciduous tree, a beech called the fagus. He spends hours climbing through the hay bales, finding and killing slugs in the garden, tramping around in his gumboots, going on ‘adventures’ in the paddocks. He’s not exactly a feral child, but he’s fairly free-range.

  And what do you think Hedley’s favourite pastime is? A boy who can scramble up hills and play in mud and throw rocks in the dam and climb trees and pick his own strawberries and generally run amok?

  Well, from the age of two until today, this is it:

  ‘Daddy,’ he says, with his sweetest angel voice, holding my face in his little, usually dirty, hands. ‘Do you know what my favourite things are?’

  ‘Hugs and kisses,’ I offer in a vain attempt to sway him.

  Again the sweet voice and a coquettish tilt of the head.

  ‘My favourite things are . . . television and computer.’

  Just so long as it’s not Gourmet Farmer on the telly, I presume.

  Baked golden syrup-scented rice pudding

  Serves 4–6

  I’ve started using risotto rice in my puddings, because that’s what I have in the house, with great results. This pud will firm up more as it cools, so it’s a bit runny when I take it from the oven. Cook for longer if you want it thicker. Demerara sugar is a very good raw sugar. In its place you could use ordinary raw sugar instead.

  750 ml (26 fl oz/3 cups) milk

  125 ml (4 fl oz/½ cup) pouring (whipping) cream

  1 vanilla bean, split lengthways

  90 g (3¼ oz/about ½ cup) demerara (raw) sugar

  1 teaspoon golden syrup (light treacle)

  80 g (2¾ oz/about 1/3 cup) arborio or short-grain rice

  about ½ teaspoon ground nutmeg, ideally freshly grated

  Preheat the oven to 150°C (300°F/Gas 2).

  Place the milk, cream and vanilla bean in a casserole dish with the sugar and golden syrup and give it a quick and vigorous stir. Throw in the rice and top with the nutmeg. Bake for 1½–2 hours, or until cooked, stirring once after 45 minutes. Yes, it may appear a bit runny at the end of the cooking time, but it will thicken up more as it cools.

  Lamb

  I’m still asked if I actually live on the farm. Whether I moved to the country just to be on telly. For some people it seems inconceivable that I would’ve done what I’ve done without a film crew. But the reality is actual
ly the opposite. I made a choice to change my life in a huge, fundamental way, and just happened to have a film crew follow.

  It was a weird thing, moving to the farm, learning new skills, taking on new animals, while being filmed for SBS. I imagine that simply taking on a property can hold enough challenges for someone with my paucity of rural skill, but my experience was magnified by the presence of a film crew. Now, when I say film crew, really it was just Max most of the time, and Russell a fair bit too. They’d eat in the house; we’d travel together if need be. The research was usually done by me, trying to remember whom I’d met, or whom I’d heard of, who could be helpful in setting up the farm. When we had to do in-depth research I’d ring Nick, because his contact list was about ten times the size of mine.

  It’s never been, and still isn’t, my greatest dream to be on television. I’m still not sure that having a camera showcase your failings on national telly is a good thing. But I wanted to give prominence to local producers, I wanted Australians to value food that was well grown, reared and made. The desire I had, and my original intention—to showcase small, artisan producers—came to fruition, albeit in a story framed by my own experience.

  I did worry, though, about putting people in front of the camera. If I wasn’t comfortable being filmed, I imagined that many of these small-holders and micro-producers would feel the same. So in an attempt to alleviate any nervousness, I’d explain that, well, the show was going to air on SBS, so not that many people were going to see it anyway. It was probably a bit mean of me, but the reality is some people never tune into SBS because it’s simply not on their radar. I was trying to lower the expectations, lower the stress of these primary producers who, let’s face it, are all virtually neighbours of mine, by suggesting they needn’t be nervous because nobody they knew would watch it.

  But guess what? If you own a goat dairy or you’re an organic quinoa grower, the television you’re likely to watch isn’t The Bachelorette or The Biggest Loser. It’s a show about the land, the produce and the idiot newcomer who makes most real farmers look like world-renowned experts.

  So, while the show did end up following my storylines, I’m inordinately proud that it managed to do what I originally wanted, which is to encourage people to know where their food comes from, and to try and give growing it a crack themselves, or if they can’t do that, to get to know the grower.

  Gourmet Farmer’s director and cameraman, Max, certainly got to know a few growers over ten months of filming. He drank a lot of coffee at farmhouse tables. He had to kneel in pig poo and traipse in mud. We made him seasick on board fishing boats. He enjoyed trips to the abattoir, early morning markets, cheese factories, breweries and more. Max, fresh from the humid warmth of Sydney, shivered through a long, hard wet winter. Neither of us had any clue what kind of television we were making; I just did what I felt I could and should do, and Max tried to film absolutely everything in case it was needed for the show. And the result? A fairly naive view of what it’s actually like to transition from urban to rural living.

  Max and I bonded over coffee. Our need for caffeine on a regular basis meant road trips and schedules were based around where to stop for a fix. Over time, though, he became part of the real Puggle Farm journey. He’d film me shovelling topsoil, then put the camera down, muck in and finish wheelbarrowing a few loads. In between scenes, we’d stand around and discuss the best ways to get the farm jobs done, be it fencing off an area, moving the cow or planting a garden. Oftentimes he’d come up to the house and share a meal with us.

  Whenever I thought of television—before I was part of making television—I thought of big cameras and big crews. But really, Gourmet Farmer was just Max, who was always hanging around wanting to shoot something lovely, and Russell, the vegan sound-bloke, always lurking in the background, like my subconscience. I had countless discussions with Russell about what it meant to be a vegan, and still wear leather shoes. If anything, our chats confirmed that we are all a mix of weird contradictions. Both Max and Russell became mates. Making television in this way had a lovely homespun feel, though we probably wasted a lot of hours trying to make stuff look good, when the footage inevitably disappeared in the edit. If you shoot 16–20 hours of footage to get 23 minutes of telly, there’s a lot of editing going on.

  While Russell often had to mic us up for sound, his other role was as wrangler. When Nick, Ross and I decided to make tomato passata, at Easter of all times, we hoped to enlist a Greek or Italian to help. Ideally a nonna, an Italian grandmother, who could show us her way of doing it—mine is very much a compilation of many people’s techniques—and perhaps boss us around as we did it. Of course, no self-respecting nonna would waste that holy occasion, Easter, with strangers, so we dispatched Russell to find an alternative. He came back with a nineteen-year-old Brazilian. I’m not sure what she brought to the filming, or the sauce-making, though I’m sure Russell had good intentions in mind.

  Max’s footage, with Ross cooking mussels in the sauce in the woodfired oven, looked the goods, even without a nonna to tell us what to do.

  One thing that Max really wanted to film was the arrival of our first lambs. Doddery, wobbly-legged, wonderfully fluffy, playful lambs make great telly. We weren’t sure, though, if lambs would be forthcoming at Puggle Farm, let alone before the end of the filming season.

  My sheep arrived too late for most farmers to think of lambing. Fred, a breeder of a famed meat breed, the Wiltshire Horn, was based on Bruny Island. I checked out his flock, leaning on gates and chatting with Fred and his mum, as farmers are wont to do, and decided on the spot to give the sheep a go. Fred, a man almost as woolly as his sheep, brought over my three Wiltshire Horn ewes, along with a borrowed ram, in early May. Despite the ram showing some interest in the girls at the time, I wasn’t sure they’d got up to much. There’s a distinct season for lambing in Tasmania, and if the girls aren’t pregnant by about early June, forget it.

  Then, suddenly, the sheep started to look rotund. Bellies as round and taut as an Olympian’s bicep. And when, one Sunday, I saw one of the ewes spending time alone, lying down under the trees rather than traipsing the paddocks near the house, I figured a birth was imminent. After dinner I found her, flat out on the ground for each contraction, standing and nibbling grass in between. I didn’t know how a ewe was supposed to look in the days, hours and minutes before the big event, but one thing was for sure, the big event was about to happen. I rang Max and invited him to watch the birth, hoping he’d make it from Hobart in time.

  A neighbour, whose sheep had given birth a couple of months prior, offered to lend a hand. I didn’t even know when I should ask for help. It turned out my sheep, Rosie, didn’t need it. As Max set up the camera, Rosie’s contractions were three minutes apart; by the time he was filming they were two minutes apart. The ewe squatted, letting out only the tiniest clicking sound from her mouth. Then a little lamb was born, pushed out like a long, thin sausage, late on Sunday night as the frost settled on the grass. The baby’s head and forelegs were out first, the hind legs last. Within minutes it was licked clean by its mother and on its feet. Within the hour it was suckling. Birth is at once both shocking and exhilarating to watch, a privilege to witness. That we managed to film this strange, intimate moment—one intrinsically tied to life on the farm—was also a privilege to air on screen.

  In the background, unbeknown to viewers who saw this episode of the show, two other pairs of eyes also witnessed the birth. Sadie had wheeled up the pram, with Hedley rugged to his eyeballs, to see this strangely compelling act of nature. It was eerily familiar yet odd to be present at another birth so soon after Hedley’s. His, I can tell you, wasn’t nearly as quick or quiet.

  By the time morning broke there were two lambs. Another ewe, Louise, must have quietly gone into labour at dawn. And a few days after that, our remaining ewe, Hettie, had twins. So we went from no lambs one day, to four a week later. They were the first mammals born on Puggle Farm.

  A neighbour r
eckons sheep always give birth in bad weather. My next season proved the point. All the lambs were born when the rain fell heavily and the creek that carves Puggle Farm in two rose quickly, running unusually fast and deep.

  Two lambs first met the outside world on an icy cold night followed by a frosty morning, both mothers giving birth within hours of each other. Twins came later, skinnier and more likely to wander off. They followed me as much as their mother. The risk of searching for them and checking they were well each morning was that they would see me and wander back to the house (over the creek) with me, not stay with their mother. The risk of not searching each morning was that they may, yet again, have wandered off, out of the paddock, or into the creek.

  One year, we actually lost a lamb in the flooded creek. The ewes, crazily, had crossed over the swollen creek, and their offspring, less than a day out of the womb, followed. I held my breath. Later I found one of the lambs had managed to get through the fence and up the road, where it mewled quietly under a tree in the pouring rain. Bringing a lost sheep back to the fold is, indeed, a profound experience.

  Another year, nature again gave us twins. Sheep have been bred to throw twins quite often; it’s not the medical issue that it would be if you had twin calves and the like. Generally twin lambs can thrive. These two were born on a blustery, cold, very wet night, under the cover of our bush block. One was sturdy enough, but the smaller, fragile lamb was taken by a Tasmanian devil on its first night; it must’ve staggered away from its mum. All we found was a leg.

  They say the only man who hasn’t had dead lambs has never reared lambs. They say a lot of tough stuff in the bush. Like your cows won’t notice a new fence that’s been put up a bit wonky, but your neighbours will, even if they don’t comment on it.