Published The Advocate, February 18, 2006
SO MANY farmers’ markets pop up each weekend it makes me wonder if anyone is left behind to look after the farm. Some markets offer not much beyond a couple of trestle tables loaded with potted shrubs and tubs of honey, along with the obligatory tea urn. It doesn’t matter; the social outing is what counts. At the other extreme is Hobart’s Salamanca Market. You’d be hard-put to find a dinky-di farmer at Salamanca. More likely, you will be knocked down by the crush of people driving 4WDs with National Parks passes stuck on the windscreens. First up, I fell into step behind a couple of muffin-top teenagers heading roly-poly in the direction of the food van. Forget the macrobiotic salad, they bought hotdogs and I had a bag of chips. It soon started to rain but was too crowded to raise an umbrella – except for the mum holding one over her tiny-tot daughter while she busked with a violin. Cute as a button and, of course, I had forgotten the camera. Any tourist suffering a bout of affluenza headed straight for the Huon pine stalls. So many bread boards and chopping blocks, is there any Huon pine left in the wilderness? A CD was playing music evoking a forest breathing or the tinkling of glacial ice. Further along came the sound of a didgeridoo and bongo combo. I kept my distance. I also avoided the stalls selling magical crystals, bottles of life essences and smelly soap. Get too close and you run the risk of being entranced by the aura and later discover you have bought something completely useless. Also, those stalls tend to attract a certain ‘type’ wearing tangled love beads and matted hair: so earnest, so indignant, so suffragette. So scary. Flowing between the two rows of stalls there was an endless daisy chain of mums with baby strollers the size of RAV4 vehicles. Just one had to stop to checkout a stall and the whole market went into gridlock. Imagine this happening a hundred times an hour, shuffling along and going almost nowhere, and you can understand why I made a break for it and slipped sideways behind the stalls. And bumped into a trio of Goths wearing Dracula capes, in their horror makeup and lank black hair. Their boyfriends had so much metalwork in their faces they looked like hood ornaments. They had taken a great deal of care to appear ‘alternative’, to declare their individuality. Yet they all looked the same. Like bats, Goths could not survive alone. Off to one side a mime in frosted bronze paint was pretending to be a statue. Whenever someone threw money into his plastic bucket, he moved in a slow, mechanical sort of way. The best part of the day was the boy, gawping and not watching where he was going, who tripped over the mime’s bucket and coins spilled everywhere. I have never seen a frozen mime move so fast. You wouldn’t be dead for quids.
Friday, February 10, 2006
Published The Advocate, February 11, 2006
IN A week when it was confirmed the food on our plates was becoming expensive also came news of a retired English civil servant Arthur Boyt, who was compiling a book of roadkill recipes. Starting with a pheasant when he was 13, Mr Boyt had since scraped all manner of creatures from the bitumen and eaten them: otter, porcupine, weasel, rat, cat and bat, which he said tasted like grey squirrel, and a Labrador that reminded him of lamb. His all-time favourite, though, was a badger sandwich. By now the warm and fuzzy animal lovers among us will be passing out, as will the Hygiene Nazis, and I admit to feeling a little queasy myself. But Mr Boyt insists any roadkill, even an animal that has been dead for a while and gone green, can be eaten if properly cooked – free, tasty and nutritious. Yum. He should pay Tasmania a visit. Spoiled for choice, we are, when it comes to roadkill. He would find enough dead possum per kilometre to open a BYO restaurant; he could also feast nightly on Tassie devil; and have a few mates around at the weekend for barbecued plover. The squeamish need to ask themselves what’s their problem: the thought of eating roadkill or the type of creature? Both, in all likelihood, but it depends what you grew up eating. Many people would baulk at eating a Labrador, but not in Asia; the French eat horse meat; and cute guinea pigs are roasted in South America. On the Coast, we like our tucker to be as fresh as possible and we’re not too picky about its origins. If it runs, flies or swims, it’s all fair game – legal or not. Old-timers can remember the days when large garfish used to be trapped in certain rock pools off West Park when the tide went out. All you needed was a stick to flick them out of the water, so I am told, although I don’t believe it. The fishing holes disappeared under landfill and tears well in my eyes. I have eaten plenty of native fauna such as kangaroo, emu and pie floater – none of them as roadkill although the floater’s green pea soup and lashings of vinegar, tomato sauce and black pepper looked like a fatality. Last week, getting among the Coastal fauna, I ate my first mutton bird after screwing up my nose for a long time at the thought of eating what people had told me was an oily rag that tasted like fish. It had been barbecued by a mate so there was hardly any oil left and, yes, it did taste of anchovies, only milder. It went down a treat with a beer, especially after an entrée of whitebait patties. I had reservations about the whitebait having possibly been poached outside the legal netting season until my supplier guaranteed it was roadkill he had chanced on, so that was alright then. Roadkill whitebait and barbecued mutton bird – what could be more Coastal than that?
IN A week when it was confirmed the food on our plates was becoming expensive also came news of a retired English civil servant Arthur Boyt, who was compiling a book of roadkill recipes. Starting with a pheasant when he was 13, Mr Boyt had since scraped all manner of creatures from the bitumen and eaten them: otter, porcupine, weasel, rat, cat and bat, which he said tasted like grey squirrel, and a Labrador that reminded him of lamb. His all-time favourite, though, was a badger sandwich. By now the warm and fuzzy animal lovers among us will be passing out, as will the Hygiene Nazis, and I admit to feeling a little queasy myself. But Mr Boyt insists any roadkill, even an animal that has been dead for a while and gone green, can be eaten if properly cooked – free, tasty and nutritious. Yum. He should pay Tasmania a visit. Spoiled for choice, we are, when it comes to roadkill. He would find enough dead possum per kilometre to open a BYO restaurant; he could also feast nightly on Tassie devil; and have a few mates around at the weekend for barbecued plover. The squeamish need to ask themselves what’s their problem: the thought of eating roadkill or the type of creature? Both, in all likelihood, but it depends what you grew up eating. Many people would baulk at eating a Labrador, but not in Asia; the French eat horse meat; and cute guinea pigs are roasted in South America. On the Coast, we like our tucker to be as fresh as possible and we’re not too picky about its origins. If it runs, flies or swims, it’s all fair game – legal or not. Old-timers can remember the days when large garfish used to be trapped in certain rock pools off West Park when the tide went out. All you needed was a stick to flick them out of the water, so I am told, although I don’t believe it. The fishing holes disappeared under landfill and tears well in my eyes. I have eaten plenty of native fauna such as kangaroo, emu and pie floater – none of them as roadkill although the floater’s green pea soup and lashings of vinegar, tomato sauce and black pepper looked like a fatality. Last week, getting among the Coastal fauna, I ate my first mutton bird after screwing up my nose for a long time at the thought of eating what people had told me was an oily rag that tasted like fish. It had been barbecued by a mate so there was hardly any oil left and, yes, it did taste of anchovies, only milder. It went down a treat with a beer, especially after an entrée of whitebait patties. I had reservations about the whitebait having possibly been poached outside the legal netting season until my supplier guaranteed it was roadkill he had chanced on, so that was alright then. Roadkill whitebait and barbecued mutton bird – what could be more Coastal than that?
