Tammi Tasting Terroir

I have an article up on The Hoopla today: Happy ‘Free Range’ Christmas. In it, I detail the certification standards around free-range meat in Australia, and give suggestions about which ones to trust and where to source ethically-produced poultry and pork, plus some advice and links on sustainable seafood.

There are more retailers and promoters of ethical and local produce than I had space for in the article, so I thought I’d put a few more here. Not all produce listed by these sites will necessarily be free-range meats – I’ve included local directories here, and you’ll need to do your own local homework on the details!

I’d be very interested in feedback on more sites – I’ll pop them into the following list as I’m made aware of more.

Foodo

Australian Regional Food Guide

Pigeon House 150 (Wollongong, NSW)

Transition Mt Alexander Local Food Guide (VIC)

Daylesford Macedon Produce (VIC)

Local Harvest: The Sunshine Coast Regional Food Directory (Qld)

Feast Fine Foods (Adelaide, SA)

As we commence RoadTripUSA, I’m thinking a lot about food. Okay, I always think a lot about food, but there’s something quite specific I’m thinking about and it’s around ‘ecotarianism’, pleasure and conviviality…

In America we’ll eat a lot of good food and a bit of bad food. To judge good and bad I weigh up flavour, texture, ‘wholeness’, seasonality, regionality, sustainability, animal husbandry, workers’ rights, and to some degree, health (though food that’s ‘bad’ for you because it’s fatty, etc, is something I don’t spend much time thinking about regarding our family as our lifestyle of predominantly whole foods nearly always ensures a well-balanced diet – but that’s another post). Making choices that ‘tread lightly’ and treat food and producers respectfully is what I understand by ‘ecotarian’, a fairly new term, discussed on the ABC recently by Cristy Clark.

Like most people, sometimes we compromise our usual principles and eat what we consider ‘bad food’ to greater or lesser extents. Road trips inevitably include some potato chips and sometimes a meal from Subway or a local takeaway, and on Friday nights at home we’ll occasionally order pizza or pick up fish and chips. When we make these choices, we’re still able to avoid factory-farmed pork and chicken rather easily.

When travelling, we usually let our standards slide on ethical meat – we tend to just eat everything as a way of understanding culture better – and that includes pork and chicken that is most likely factory farmed. The traceability issues we face at home are compounded overseas where we’re even less certain of our food’s origins. We continue with our usual habits of not eating too much meat generally, but we do like to try all the local specialties. In America, we’re usually with my family or friends, so keeping to ecotarian principles is pretty easy as we generally know the provenance of the food. However, eating out presents a greater challenge unless dining in one of America’s many wonderful SOLE (Sustainable, Organic, Local and Ethical) focused restaurants and cafes.

This trip to America is different to a visit ‘home’. We’ll be driving through a number of unfamiliar regions, and there’s a world of interesting local dishes I can’t wait to sample, including such nommish delights as pulled pork in the South… but the odds of there being much free-range pork on the menus in Alabama are pretty slim, I reckon. Chicken will pose a similar problem, and thanks to America’s preponderance of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), commonly known as ‘factory farms’, even beef poses an ethical dilemma unless you know the provenance. I could go on about dairy, seafood, fast food franchises, processed snack foods… you get the picture, but I’ll use pork as my primary example given our plans to be free-range pig farmers.

Will we eat pork in the full knowledge that it isn’t from ‘happy pigs’?

Yes, we will.

We won’t eat a lot of it, but we’ll eat it. There are a few reasons why – more than simply ‘I really want to try that because it looks really delicious’, though I can’t pretend that’s not part of the decision-making process. There are a few key reasons why we will compromise our usual ethics, but the core one is conviviality. That is, while traveling, I don’t want to be ‘that person’ who makes everyone uncomfortable by listing all the things we don’t eat, or by turning down food that someone has offered us in their home with, ‘oh, we don’t eat factory-farmed pork’ every time. Such a response not only tells your host you don’t want what they’ve offered, it infers they have done the wrong thing in offering it to you. I would rather leave ethical food discussions to this blog and other writings, and to conversations that are not taking place in the presence of such food.

At home, standards are easy to maintain. We buy or grow the food and we cook it. When in someone else’s home, I don’t ask if the pork is free range if that’s what’s on the menu. In fairness, my friends all know how we are and are pretty unlikely to give us factory-farmed meat, but if they did, I’d eat it. The animal is already dead and cooked at this stage – in my opinion to refuse to eat it is wasteful and disrespectful of the life it gave as well as inhospitable towards one’s hosts.

Mind you, it’s not only when a host offers us something. There’s food on airlines, lack of choice in small country grocery stores and the usual road trip compromises. Or the myriad ‘hidden’ food ethical dilemmas, such as monoculture GM soy in the ingredients or factory-farmed eggs in some muffins at a diner. While our ethic enables us to avoid many such things, we would be miserable trying to completely avoid the horrors of industrial agriculture – sometimes the pleasure principle is achieved by not agonising so much and knowing you’ve done your best.

As I write these things I’m still sorting out the questions around hypocrisy and being complicit in an unethical food system. But the way I’m thinking about it is to understand ecosystems beyond their biological components – to include the social aspects as well.

If farming had not moved outside of ecosystems – as we all know industrial agriculture requires enormous external inputs and must find places beyond their boundaries to process their outputs – we wouldn’t have the severe negative environmental consequences we face today. But in addition to choosing food that comes from a healthy ecosystem, we should generally choose food that is still intricately linked to communities – that both sustains and is sustained by communities. When we conceive of an ethical approach to food this way, we must consider the human social interactions as well as those between humans and other animals or humans and the earth.

I guess rather than calling it ‘ecotarianism’ then, you might call it ‘ethotarianism’, because it’s about a consistent ethic of respect and pleasure. I’ve often said we should all be hedonists – in the tradition whereby one’s driving principle is to seek pleasure, both for oneself and for others, and taking one’s pleasure should not withdraw it from others, whether they are human, animal or vegetable.

But this complicates the question – the choices are in fact even more difficult than simply seeking ethically produced food – because sometimes the pleasure of various participants will be at odds. A clear example is when I’m offered a plate of pulled pork from unhappy pigs by a relative in the South – it’s too late to give that pig a happy life, but I can still be gracious to my host. Wherever possible, I avoid putting myself in such a position, but once in it, choices must be made, and mine will be to eat what I’m offered.

Presumably most of you have noticed that the Tour de France has been on. Given my recent work travels, my exhilarating participation in the democratic process of establishing a new peak representative body for international students (#allhailCISA), my usual family demands with the Jonai (who are orsm not only in my view, but by global consensus), and my public disavowal of all forms of spectator sport, I really haven’t. In fact, when someone said ‘Lance Armstrong’, I had an immediate case of deja vu/wait, what? But some time ago, I agreed to post something about the destination of Stage 12 of the Tour de France when the lovely Barbara of Winos & Foodies asked for people interested in posting something on the food of particular regions…

See, as my few regular readers will know, Tammi Tasting Terroir is meant to be about understanding, considering, eating and critiquing regional distinctions, variations, meanings and instabilities. So when Barbara asked who was interested in a project about such regional distinctions I think I might have extinguished a star as my hand shot up. But wait, it has to be about France? Hm, my research is about Australia, Vietnam & Italy, but sure, why not? It’s not like I don’t know how to do research… (increasingly, don’t you just ask the twitters?) <hopes her supervisor isn’t reading this>

Tami (one ‘m’, clearly not me, but an interesting confluence nonetheless) over at Running With Tweezers did a gorgeous post on tapenade, tomatoes provencale and roasted apricots for Stage 11, which you should definitely pop over and drool at.

So it’s lucky that I ‘ve been to France. In fact I’ve been thrice. I went with my family at 14 (please don’t ask them for the 4^th of July story on the Orient Express), fell in love with Stuart in Paris while working as an au pair to earn enough money to survive (recounted briefly in this poem that is of no interest to anyone except us), and finally, with my entire American family plus our then 5yo, 3yo, & 3 month old children, mostly in the south. And that’s when we made it to the Languedoc region, which is where Mende is, which is where Stage 12 of the Tour finishes this year…

So what do you want to know about Mende, the Languedoc region, and its foods? Well, the critical dish we’re going to discuss here is cassoulet. Of course the region is also famous for its duck confit, and I could tell you about those I’ve made and those we’ve brought back from France in tins, but I’m not going to do that here… According to my much-beloved French sister-in-law, one of the things that makes cassoulet famous is that it takes three days to digest.

So here goes – I’ve made cassoulet a few times, and it’s pretty hard to stuff up if you’re paying any attention and using plenty of delicious ingredients. The catch is that I’ve been urgently called to Sydney on work (and obviously I should have written this much earlier, but to be fair, I only just got back from two days on the Gold Coast – speaking at a conference – and a week in Tassie setting up CISA and researching the ethical raising of pigs. Okay, we also ate a lot of Bruny Island Cheese).

What this catch means is that I’m cheating a bit. I’ve made cassoulet, I’ve eaten plenty of it, and now I’m going to give you a recipe I’ve drawn together from my memory of making it, and recipes I’ve read/tasted/imagined/enjoyed and ask you to make it yourself. I’ve crowdsourced photos from lovely food bloggers on the twitters (who enjoyed the versions below at Libertine, written up here by @tomatom) since I’m unable to cook it up here in the hotel in Sydney. I’m now tempted to make it for friends on Wednesday night, so will update with photos if I pull that off…

This photo was taken by the fabulous Penny (@jeroxie) over at Addictive and Consuming.

Cassoulet

This hearty stew varies considerably in different regions (and even within them, as per any famous dish made in various households), and it’s fun to imagine the many spirited debates southerners must have about the requirements for pork, quality pork sausage, lamb or duck confit. Personally, I reckon you simply cannot go wrong as long as there is free range happy pork (‘only one bad day’), sausage and duck. Yes, I realise that means this is a very rich dish – that’s the point. And how fitting that I am offering it to you here in Australia’s depth of winter, as I cannot imagine it having any appeal in the current French summer!

1kg haricot (cannellini is fine, a variety of haricot) beans

1 duck, jointed

700g fresh Toulouse (pork) sausage (free range)

1 free range pig’s trotter

100g free range bacon or speck, roughly chopped

1 garlic globe, chopped

2 onions, sliced

pinch thyme

3 bay leaves

1 carrot, thickly sliced

1 stick of celery, sliced

2T tomato paste (you can also use homemade roast sugo, in which case double quantity)

Salt & pepper to taste

Soak the beans overnight. Drain and put on the heat for 10-20 minutes, until soft but still al dente. Take off the heat, drain and set aside. Meanwhile, you should be making a stock from the trotter, garlic, onion, thyme, bay leaves, carrot & celery. Simmer in water for at least two hours to infuse the stock with loads of flavour. When you’re satisfied the stock has a lovely flavour, it’s ready for its next starring role.

Meanwhile, fry the duck pieces just to brown and seal in delectable juices. Also fry off the sausages. You can then slice them and add to the beans or else leave them whole – this is purely a matter of your taste and aesthetic. Set the duck and sausage aside while stock comes to maturity.

Once both the beans & the stock are ready, and the meat is browned, layer roughly, including the bacon pieces, in a casole, or a casserole dish or oven pot of some sort, ensuring some sausage is pushed in at the top. It’s useful to put the trotter in the bottom for more flavour. Pour half the stock in when you’ve half filled the pot. Stir the tomato paste or sugo through.

I use my le Creuset (I should mention I have one that was a gift, & another that was found in the hard rubbish collection in Carlton – it has exactly *one chip* in the enamel in the bottom, but somebody threw it out – lucky us). Pour the rest of the stock into the pot, cover and put in a medium/low oven for around three hours (150-160C). Uncover after the first hour and allow the top to form a bit of a crust, cooking for a further hour or two, pushing the cassoulet down with a large spoon periodically. Pour more stock in during cooking if it dries out too much.

Some people put bread crumbs on top to form the crust, but my understanding is that it’s more traditional to allow the beans and sausage to form their own crust by slow cooking uncovered at the end.

Serve with a scrumptious fresh baguette, preferably homemade. Predictably, I prefer sourdough.

Here’s another photo, this one by the orsm @snarkattack.

And now watch the food tour go on over at Barry’s Bistro as the Tour heads into Stage 13…

People who know me know that I cook for the pleasure of it, and that I am perhaps more of a feeder than an eater – I am compelled to cook for others, to nurture, love, entertain and delight friends and family with copious amounts of delicious food (well, usually delicious, sometimes ordinary and occasionally woeful). This is not to say I don’t like to indulge in sumptuous eating myself, but my focus is often more on the production and distribution side of the equation. And I love to cook with others who are as passionate about cooking as I am, especially when their motivations are similar.

The world is full of people cooking, but their drives to do so can be wildly disparate. Folks cook because they have to, for the pleasure of the creativity and results, to nurture community, to show off, and to accrue cultural capital, amongst other rationale (many subconscious). I suspect most of the time our motivations are complicated.

As a keen cook, I have many friends who are also passionate cooks, as well as many reluctant or aspiring cook friends. I love having opportunities to cook with friends and family, especially when our motivations are aligned, as that makes for the most comfortable sort of communal cooking. Those inclined to regale me with the expense of their ingredients, or to dictate to me a ‘better’ way to do something (though thoughts and advice are very welcome, controlling my creative process is not), or to rabbit on about how ‘there is only ONE extra virgin olive oil to use, and it must be Italian’ (etc ad nauseaum) are the ones I find to be kitchen killjoys, frankly. Admittedly, sometimes we will all comment on the high cost of a much-coveted item we are delighted to have, or go through a phase (it’s always a phase) where we will only buy a particular variety of something from a special place of origin, but for those in the market for more cultural capital, it’s a modus operandi.

And so it happened that the beautiful gift economy of the Twitterverse brought me a new friend who matched me fantastically in the kitchen these holidays. I met Zoe (@crazybrave, who also blogs here) in real life a few months back in Canberra (where she lives with her partner & two adorable children). That day she showed me her garden full of artichokes and chooks, the bathtubs housing the newly planted water chestnuts, and her copious shelves of a droolworthy cookbook collection, then made us a lovely impromptu lunch of grilled chicken and white bean salad before giving me a lift to the airport. A friendship was struck, and it was obvious to us both that fruits would be born of it.

Which brings us to our recent holiday near Crookwell in southern New South Wales. A trip that should have taken the Jonai about eight hours in the Volvster in fact lasted two days, due to a blowout just over an hour into the trip. Of course, we were travelling on the Sunday after Christmas, so nobody was open to sell us a new tyre. We limped at 80km/hr the 200km up to Albury, where the kids at least got to have a lovely swim in the Murray, intending to buy a new tyre the next morning for the final 400km. Alas, Monday was the Boxing Day holiday – everything was still closed – and even the cafe where we broke our fast added a 10% surcharge for the pleasure of serving us on a public holiday (think insult to injury). Twitter was consulted, then mostly ignored. The Jonai were unstoppable. Wild horses would not keep us in Albury for another night. And so we hit the road, at the zen-like speed of 80km/hr, and drove all the way to Mark and Antonia’s gorgeous country retreat, Hillview, wondering whether intrepid would at any moment become just plain stupid. It didn’t, we made it, and the feasting began.

The peace of Hillview cannot be overstated. Some years ago Mark accidentally cut the phone line, and they decided that suited them very well, thank you. And so it does. There’s no mobile reception for the most part either, so it’s kind of like camping, but in a really beautiful old Edwardian house, in beds, with a toilet and a shower. And electricity. Okay, it’s not at all like camping except that you disconnect from all social media, and just plain socialise with loved ones. And read lots of books. Lots and lots of books. Oh, and there’s an oven…

Before Zoe and the kids arrived (her partner Owen came up two days later), we feasted on such diversities as lamb marinated in yoghurt, garlic, lemon and salt, cooked out on the brazier, and Gado Gado another night, but things really got going with the new arrivals. Digging through Mark and Antonia’s awesome collection of cookbooks old and new, I found a Marcella Hazan recipe for a sort of baked risotto with layers of eggplant, sugo and parmigiana. I had a frozen ratatouille with me, so we improvised a Risotto Ratatouille Parmigiana that was out of this world.

The next night, we worked out our menu around the enormous t-bone steaks Zoe had brought from her sister’s farm near Bombala, complemented beautifully with a fresh horseradish sauce from the garden. As Zoe moved to prepare some green beans with cashews, I whipped up a garlicky cheesy pasta for the kids and some roast potatoes to go with our steaks. All of this was achieved with such ease and camaraderie you’d think we’d been cooking together for years, not a day. There were tastings, suggestions and questions, advice sought, notes compared on our usual techniques, and plenty of chatter about all things Twitter, food and family.

Did I mention we both brought the same knives? Each of us brought our ten-inch chef’s knife and our Chinese cleavers. Zoe’s was sharper than mine (for shame, tammois), but we managed to find a sharpener that was ‘not a gadget’ and rectify the situation.

The day of Owen’s arrival, we decided to roast the Wessex Saddleback pork shoulder the ever-generous Zoe had brought along, taking inspiration from the beautiful big horseradish leaves. So Zoe laid the leaves in the roasting dish, studded the pork with garlic and fennel flowers plucked from the roadside, rubbed it with lemon and salt and poured a bit o’ bubbly over the top. It marinated for a couple of hours and then we roasted it for about an hour and a half. Meanwhile, I stuffed tomatoes with garlicky breadcrumbs made from the end of my homemade bread (I got a starter going the first day and subsequently baked fresh bread every second day – this is a new thing for me, but watch this space!), as well as some fresh pecorino and lovely reggiano, and the basil we brought in a pot with us from Melbourne. Next, I threw together a potato gratin, steeping the milk with herbs from the garden before straining it onto the ‘taters, along with plenty of mozzarella, reggiano and Stuart’s home-cured olives. It was a spectacular dinner out on the patio with its marvellous views of the surrounding hills.

The final night we were all together, ravioli was on the menu. I figured I’d do a simple spinach and ricotta filling (Oscar’s favourite) and an even simpler burnt sage butter sauce with a little garlic thrown in (’cause it just ain’t a Jonai dinner without plenty o’ garlic). Simple, right? Sure, except that I left my brain elsewhere when I didn’t suggest we let the frozen spinach thaw and then strain it, resulting in a very watery filling that did its utmost to destroy the integrity of the pasta. When we realised where we were going so horribly wrong (much later than I should have recognised the problem), Zoe tried making pasta band-aids for the ill affected and I tried straining the filling through a clean chux. This helped, but the difficulties continued. Stuart even came in and did a big manly squeezing of the filling through a linen tea towel, after which I made the final tray of picture perfect ravioli. The earliest ones by this stage, we were referring to as the ‘crapioli’. Those that were clearly not going to survive a rolling boil I popped into a baking tray with water and put in the oven to cook, then served to the children first – to my surprise, they were highly acclaimed! And so were the many more that followed. The lesson? Well, aside from start cooking earlier (we didn’t eat until 8:30pm, which is a wee bit late for the kiddles), make sure your filling isn’t too wet, and be resigned to chaos if you want a bunch of kids to help, the main lesson Zoe and I took was that we all make mistakes, and in most cases, they’re salvageable. Sometimes, even delicious.

Of course there was more food than just the dinners, like the garlicky, basily, lemony hollandaise on mushies one morning, many pancakes, Zoe’s magnificent salad of air-dried beef, white beans, roast capsicum, pine nuts, baby spinach, olive oil, balsamic and mustard, Stuart’s delectable roast garlicky baba ganoush, endless loaves of fresh bread and the final quiche/pastie/pie making extravaganza to use up leftovers and dregs of ingredients. And although a lot of time was spent on the labour, it felt quite effortless, and often seamless. What a treat and a pleasure to cook together in this way, without competition or posturing, just for the love of it. All nine of us felt nurtured and nourished, bodily, emotionally and certainly for me, spiritually. Such is the joy anyone can have if they choose to cook with passion and pleasure, and to do so with others who take the same approach.

Sometimes, the stars are just aligned, and nothing you do will stop the goodness coming your way. At least that’s how it felt when food blogger and Twittermate @tomatom offered me the opportunity to accompany him to the de Bortoli family’s annual Salami Day in the Yarra Valley. This came on the heels, by the way, of the wonderful @Ganga108 offering to ship some cookbooks she was clearing out to any address in Australia; mere days later Kylie Kwong’s Recipes & Stories landed on my doorstep. The Twitterverse is an amazing land of plenty, especially if you hook up with your real community of interest. But back to Salami Day…

The day began before first light, as Ed and I followed our Google maps blue dot on the iPhone (well, technically the blue dot follows us, but on the return trip after hours of grappa and sangiovese, I was pretty sure we were following the dot…) up to the de Bortoli vineyards. Just as we pulled up, the sun having just risen, there was the pig, which had just been sawn in half. Within minutes, the head and other bits were on the table, where family members Maria, Dominique and Angelo set straight to work. (They had actually already butchered two pigs the day before, so were definitely in the groove.) There were only a dozen or so people around at this stage, including Darren de Bortoli (Managing Director) and his sister Leanne and her husband Steve, the winemaker and manager in the Yarra Valley. Just to prove what a small world Melbourne is, Stuart’s dad’s cousin Andrew Chapman was there taking photos for the family, accompanied by his lovely wife Josie.

As some headed off for their first coffee with a shot of grappa, Josie and I grabbed a knife each and helped shave the fat off the underside of the skin, which was then chopped up to be used for the cotechino sausages. The fat itself was a very pleasing smooth texture that felt scrumptious on the hands. These pigs had followed the strict diet for the last few months of regular acorn feasts, and the flesh was a beautiful dark pink/red as a result. In the adjoining area of the shed, another pig (not raised by the family) was on a spit for the sumptious lunch we would enjoy later… but we didn’t have to wait long before platters of salumi and freshly made ciabattas did the rounds, closely followed by trays of grappa.

By this stage, Maria, Dom, Angelo and the local butcher had made great progress on the pig, having sliced all the flesh from the bones (except the hams, which were left intact to cure and I believe some for prosciutto?). The meat was in pieces about the size of my fist, at which point they spread it across the metal tables, added the spices (chili, fennel, salt, pepper, and saltpeter), and mixed it up a bit by hand. Next it was time to pop it through the mincer (and the need for a nice big electric mincer becomes readily apparent when you see how much meat has to be processed!).As more people arrived and the accordion started to play, the atmosphere got both more festive and less intimate. For someone doing a PhD trying to unravel the difference between Hage’s ‘cosmo-multiculturalists’ (some would call them the ‘foodies’: people who are ‘into’ food for reasons of social distinction) and cosmopolitans (food + community = understanding, openness to cultural difference), the shift at this point was interesting. I felt enormously privileged to have been there from the beginning with the family, neighbours and friends, and had really enjoyed the easy comradery of the communal butchering.

After the mincing comes the salami stuffing. The previous day, they had made the salami with collagen casings, which are made from pork intestines, but reconstituted to get a more even and stronger consistency – hence those salami were quite straight and even as they hung in the cool room. Today they were using intestines (long enough to stretch round the shed!), so ended up with lovely curved salami, which Angelo expertly dipped in near boiling water, then tied up with twine to be hung.

I believe the main salami made would be described as sopressata from Calabria (but I could be wrong). There was some venison brought by the butcher that was also made into salami – apparently venison is too lean for a good salami (too dry) and so was mixed with the pork and fat. Finally the cotechino was made, requiring two times through the mincer with different blades to churn through the tough rind. Whereas the salami will be hung for about 6-8 weeks, the cotechino could be eaten immediately – I was told that you can boil it or cook it slowly for quite awhile to soften it up further.

The morning drew on towards lunch, by which time the crowds had really arrived and the wine was flowing freely. About a hundred of us sat down to a beautiful meal of pork sausages made the day before (to chef Tim Keenan’s recipe, which has renewed my belief that there are really good sausages to be had in the world – yum!), served with wine soaked caramelised onions and grilled polenta with a salad of mixed greens and vinaigrette. This was followed by a beautiful array of cheeses and that fresh ciabatta again. I enjoyed the charming and interesting company of Darren de Bortoli over lunch, and we conversed for hours on his family’s history, community, cultural diversity and cosmopolitanism in Australia (with a few forays into American politics and friendly disagreements over Howard).

As the afternoon waned, the conversation moved from kids’ lunches (“We used to be weird for our salami sandwiches, now they’re so common the kids say they’re boring and want sushi! Sushi, for God’s sake!”), to the resurgence in interest in the ‘old ways’, such as the salami days. Darren made the point that even the ‘skippies’ are into it now, and someone laughed that “people are calling them ‘foodies’, when all they are is wogs!” There was much talk of how the southerners (Italians) maintain the salami day tradition, with the requisite grappa, wine and sociality, whereas the northerners have the salami day, but just get in, get the job done, and get home again. This ‘northern/southern’ discussion was from people who were third and fourth generation Australians, yet still maintained their regional distinctions here in Australia. Fascinating!

Alas, it was time to bid the generous de Bortolis grazie e arrivederci, and follow our blue dot back into the city, where the children and Stuart had excitedly prepared us a three-course meal (not realising I would be too full to eat much!). I look forward to a sausage making day with the children one day soon in our own attempts to nurture our community with food and ritual.