The cold makes for lovely cooking weather. Last weekend we made a spiced cauliflower dish inspired by a recipe in the Cumulus Inc. cookbook. Cumulus Inc. holds a special place in our hearts. It’s where Oliver and I met. In fact, he hired me for a job! This was years ago, when Oliver was the restaurant manager, and, although we’ve been together ever since, we only worked together for about three months before I moved to the role of chef Andrew McConnell’s PA. We have such fond memories of that fun, frenetic restaurant and made so many good friends whom we’re still close with today, including our packing manager Sarah who is also a Cumulus alumni. It’s such a pleasure to now supply our vegetables to the restaurant that brought us together.

The Cumulus spiced cauliflower with goat’s curd was one of the best-selling dishes in our day. It’s such a fresh and zesty salad and when you grind the spices yourself in a mortar and pestle, the scent of coriander, cumin and fennel fills the kitchen, leaving the house smelling beautiful all afternoon. Cauliflower is in season right now as is pomegranate. We used Lebanese cress (a delicate herb that looks beautiful on the plate) instead of parsley and you’ll find a bunch in the veg boxes this week along with our gorgeous cauliflowers. I was surprised by how quick and easy this warm salad was to make. You can find the recipe here. And if your nearby shops don’t stock goat’s curd, you can substitute with Greek yoghurt strained of its whey.

Citrus season is here and we are loving adding orange segments to our radicchio salads. Our current go-to radicchio salad is radicchio mix, goat’s cheese, orange segments and walnuts. Our standard radicchio dressing is a good quality vinegar with olive oil. The best quality balsamic vinegar you can find goes great with the more bitter, red radicchio, but for the milder varieties we love a chardonnay vinegar. A lot of the restaurants we sell to use Australian made Lirah vinegar. We bought some recently and it’s amazing how a good quality vinegar can elevate a salad. The other fruit we have in abundance at the moment is limes. The tree is positively laden. Our favourite thing to make with limes, aside from G&T, is Paola Bacchia’s lime, olive oil and yoghurt cake. Paola writes the wonderful Italy On My Mind blog as well as a number of fantastic Italian cookbooks inspired by her Adriatic heritage. This cake of hers just works every single time. It has a lovely limey-zing and the yoghurt makes it super moist. We’ll be adding some limes into the veg boxes this week as a bonus and we highly recommend using them for this cake!

This week veg boxes are available from CIBI Collingwood (orders in by Wednesday), Meatsmith Fitzroy (orders by tonight) and online for pick up from the farm gate in The Patch.

Until next time … eat well!

Words by Lisa Davis

As many of you know, we’re on Wurundjeri Country east of Melbourne in the Dandenong Ranges. This is rainforest country with rich, volcanic soil and abundant rainfall. Prime growing conditions. Our purple sprouting broccoli is in fine form this time of year. Don’t call it broccolini! The big guys own that name. Slice, bunch, pack – the broccoli florets are royal in their purpleness, the leaves dark and soft, the stems sweet. They taste great, but we also feel great eating them. Sometimes we walk past the fruit and veg section of the supermarket and see broccoli stalks snapped off and left behind. Are these people mad? Don’t they realise the stalk is the best bit? Our sprouting broccoli are headed for chefs around and in Melbourne and Sydney. It’s satisfying, seeing the creative ways they prepare it so the intense colour remains and the integrity is retained.

We always strive to maintain a strong dialogue between chef and farmer. You can’t produce great food without great source ingredients and it’s thrilling to think what we grow influences their menus. Chefs are hardworking, dedicated people who respect growers and the hardships we endure. The deepest pleasure, though, is in nourishing people. We provide fresh veg for our team each week and sell not only to our local community, but to families all over Melbourne. It’s easy to believe we are doing something good for the world. We are, but it’s in partnership with the plants. We water them, feed them plenty of compost, weed their soil, and prune their branches. In return they feed us. We look after the plants and the plants look after us. It’s difficult to feel lonely or stressed in the garden. With your hands in the soil, you know where you belong.

Positivity is our way of life on the farm; the idea of success a reason to get up in the morning. Without fierce positivity the uncertainty would be too much. When the ducks eat our radicchio seedlings and the rabbits ring-bark our fruit trees, we believe that next season will be better. We must or we’d never continue. As young farmers, over a decade ago, we grew despondent at times. Like when we planted rows of cauliflower seedlings only to come back the next day to find the cut-worms had sucked the juice from the tiny stems overnight and each little plant had fallen over on itself. There are always hardships to overcome, but there are more successes. That’s the life of a farmer. Oliver and I are now accustomed to the notion of failure being tied to success. We try our best to buoy our young farmers with positivity. Something fails every season. Nature gives and she takes. We reassess. How can we grow better next year? The new farmers learn that life on the farm is not always theirs to control. We do our best, that’s all we can do. Farming has taught us resilience and we’re grateful.

A grower must plan for the future. There’s optimism in that. We prepare for abundance way back in the hunger gap – that time of year towards the end of winter when there’s little ready to harvest. We plant summer crops weeks and months before they will bear fruit. It’s an exercise in hope. Each year we hope the berries will ripen. We hope the birds leave enough of them for us to enjoy. We hope the dam won’t go dry; we hope strong winds don’t blow the blossoms off our peach trees before they set fruit. We hope. In times of crisis, hope can sometimes feel like all we have. We make the best decisions we can at the time with the knowledge we have available.

We’ve had a mild start to winter, yet somehow the solstice is already nearly upon us. The more we farm the more our lives revolve around the day lengths. In the past we dwelt on soil and ambient temperature, but we’re now trying to work more in line with the plants’ instincts. They’re genetically predisposed to respond in different ways when the daylight hours are increasing or decreasing. Plants pass this information down from generation to generation. They have memory in their way. Now we’re at a point in the year when the days are short and very little changes. But from Sunday, the days get longer bit by bit and change accelerates. By the time August arrives we’ll begin to plant crops for our fourteenth summer. Fourteen summers growing on Ramarro Farm. How time flies.

Until next time … eat well!

Words by Lisa Davis

The Veneto is Italy’s most visited region, thanks to Venice. But there’s far more to it than gondola rides and stunning seafood. It’s a fertile region in the north-east of Italy stretching from the Dolomite Mountains to the Adriatic Sea and famous for prosecco, risotto rice and, of course, radicchio. The different varieties of radicchio reflect the towns they’re grown in: Treviso, Lusia, Castelfranco. The variety we’re most familiar with in Australia is Chioggia, the red ball radicchio known for its bitter flavour. The reason conventional growers don’t grow the other varieties here is because we live in a country where supermarkets dictate what’s grown based on shelf life and consistency. The conventional growers are forced to grow for uniformity and, as our seed supplier says, radicchio has a personality of its own. You might plant 100 seeds and 50 of them will turn out completely different from what the packet promised. That’s unappealing for large-scale growers who can’t risk their product being rejected by the supermarkets. But for specialised growers like us, it’s an opportunity. And by importing our own seeds we’re giving the middle finger to those bland values of uniformity and making our own statement: our ideals of quality need redefining. Perhaps beauty can be found in individuality, flavour, form and cultural heritage.

Just 100 years ago the chicory of the Veneto were wild. The people discovered that when they stored these leafy roots in their stables, rather than rotting entirely, a new heart grew inside the outer leaves which was sweeter and crunchier. And even though these varieties have now been further developed, the outer, occasionally slimy, leaves of radicchio still need to be removed to get to the heart within. Our seed supplier’s grandfather was one such cultivator of modern radicchio. Our favourite is the Rosa del Veneto, which grows green until late April after which the heart fills out with the most vibrant pink leaves that are mildly bitter and soft. The appealing colour makes it in high demand with our chef customers. It looks stunning on the plate. When we reveal the outer leaves of a Rosa and what’s inside is a hyper-coloured mix of pinks and greens, we’re reminded how amazing nature is. Every time we walk into the field to harvest we find a radicchio that looks entirely different to one we picked yesterday or last week and there’s magic in that. The radicchio says, I’m not going to play by your rules, I’m running my own race. And because we sell to clever, creative chefs, we’re able to celebrate this differentiation.

The deep red of a Treviso radicchio with its alabaster centres provides much life and colour to the winter table, defying the grey skies outside with its vibrancy. This variety can be more bitter than some of the others we grow and that bitterness pairs well in a salad with orange segments, fennel and walnuts, or even simply dressed with balsamic vinegar. The less bitter varieties, like Rosa, Lusia or Castelfranco found in our radicchio mix, are great just as they are or with a touch of salt and olive oil. In winter we find there’s enough variety to eat radicchio every day. Bitter flavours are said to be good for healthy liver function, and it feels more filling in the colder months than a salad made of lettuce. Radicchio and red wine risotto is a beautiful winter dish, and we sometimes enjoy braised radicchio alongside a steak. We’ve even been approached by someone who wants to use the outer leaves of our radicchio to make Amaro, the Italian liqueur drunk as a digestif.

All our retail stockists (listed below) carry our radicchio mix. But if you’re looking for individual varieties, our friends at CIBI Collingwood are hosting their monthly produce market this weekend on Friday 5 and Saturday 6 June. The market is a great opportunity to cook with fresh ingredients you might not always come across and bring something special to your long weekend gatherings. You can even order one of our veg boxes to pick up from CIBI. Orders in by midday Wednesday 4 June. Radicchio will also form part of the veg boxes we sell to pick up from the farm all winter.

As I wrap up this newsletter, it strikes me that perhaps we should all be more like radicchio. Running our own race, celebrating our cultural roots, and resisting uniformity by maintaining minds of our own.

Until next time … eat well!

Words by Lisa Davis

We’ve planted over a hundred olive trees, but so far only 10% of them are mature enough to fruit well. The Dandenong Ranges is not a prime olive growing location, too wet, they grow better in northern Victoria where the summers are hotter and drier, but we persist because olive trees have character. Their evergreen foliage appears different in the wet and the dry. When the wind is firm, the silver underside of the leaves is exposed giving the trees another look entirely. Olive groves are a deep signifier of the regions in Italy we’ve grown to love – Tuscany, Puglia, Sardinia – and for us they will always evoke nostalgia for our time spent there.

The thing is, it’s not that easy to get your olives processed into oil if you’re not a commercial producer with your own processing facilities. Ceres in Brunswick does run a community olives-to-oil service, but that’s more for folks with one or two trees. We’re somewhere in the middle, so we need to look further afield. Apulia Grove in Tooleen provide a small-batch olive processing service. Ceilidh and Charlie run a professional outfit with easy online bookings and friendly service, but it does take us 2.5 hours to drive there and once we stay overnight in Heathcote, it’s not exactly the most economical enterprise.

So, why do we do it?

After getting stuck in traffic in the outer eastern suburbs on our way home, we were left wondering. Harvesting the olives is quite fun once you get into it. We have these hand rakes that pull the olives off the trees without stripping the leaves, then we collect them on a tarp placed under the tree and tip the fruit into crates. For quality oil, olives can only be harvested 48 hours in advance, the fresher the better, so there’s time pressure too. This year we harvested about 60kg from our trees and friends of ours pitched in with around 30kg and, after all that time and effort, we got 10 litres of oil between us. And when you can buy great olive oil from Mount Zero and have it delivered to your door, I did begin to wonder if it was worth it.

After dropping our olives off at Apulia Grove, we drove into Heathcote and while we waited for the car to charge, we stopped in at the Heathcote Wine Hub. By this time, it was dark and we knew the wine bar was closing in half an hour, so we were expecting to be admitted begrudgingly and hurried along. To our delight we were greeted warmly by the hosts and made comfortable in the gorgeous, converted church with a glass of local shiraz and a cheese platter. It made our evening. And when we got home and tasted our own oil, we were reminded why we committed to this agrarian lifestyle.

Something special

True olio nuovo, new oil, is something very special. It’s essentially a different product from what you buy in the shops. Even if the oil you buy is marketed as ‘new oil’ it’s still weeks old by the time it gets to you. There’s a reason why, when you drive around Tuscany in the autumn, you see handwritten signs on the roadside advertising olio nuovo. The season is so short and the product is in such high demand locally that a formal marketing campaign is not required. Olio nuovo is bright green not gold. It’s spicy and fresh and peppery. It’s something to be proud of.

For us, the bonus comes when we take that ultra-fresh oil and add it to the vegetables we grow. Sprouting broccoli has just come back into season and honestly, I can feel the deep-green leafiness doing me good as I eat it. You never cook with olio nuovo, it’s for dressing. We keep it simple and boil or steam the broccoli until the stems are tender then douse it on the plate with our fresh olive oil. The warmth of the broccoli enhances the spicy, green aroma of the oil. We always make sure we have some crusty bread on hand for soaking up the leftovers. It’s not the kind of thing you waste.

We’ve only made our own olive oil once before. That year, we tried to hold onto it for as long as possible. To savour it, I suppose. But, actually, olio nuovo is best enjoyed within the first few weeks after harvesting, so this year we’re not holding back. We appreciate the goodness all the more knowing it won’t last, which, after all, is what eating seasonally is all about. One day, when all our trees are fruiting, we’d like to share this special oil with you. We love the idea of hosting an olio nuovo party. Celebrating with a wander through the olive grove then a tasting of this fleeting, magical product.

Until next time … eat well!

Words by Lisa Davis

These days you can buy a taglia puntarelle, a special puntarelle cutter and any bits that don’t push through easily can be julienned with a knife. We enjoy it served the Roman way with a punchy dressing of anchovies and lemon. Costante Imports have created a great video on how to make Puntarelle alla Romana with a recipe by Julia Busuttil Nishimura. Puntarelle is not widely available in Australia, so when ours are ready we get calls from all over requesting supply; often Italians eager for a nostalgic taste of home. If you’re a meat eater, a puntarelle salad goes well alongside crumbed pork or roasted lamb as the lemony zing of the dressing cuts through the richness of the meat and the cold crunchiness is refreshing. This week you’ll find puntarelle at Toscano’s as well as in our veg boxes. In our opinion, it’s the quickest way to be transported back to Rome.

Meet farmer Oliver

Ramarro Farm could not run without the efforts and enthusiasm of our team. So, we’d like to use this newsletter to introduce you to the incredible people that grow and prepare, pack and send the food you eat. Let’s start with Oliver! He grew up in Canberra on a block with plenty of space for a beautiful native garden and a large veggie patch. Young Oliver could often be found slipping under the mulberry tree netting or hiding in the pea bushes, shelling pods and munching on the sweet, fresh spheres right there among the tendrils. After high school, he moved to Melbourne to study Italian and sociology at Melbourne Uni and then to cement his new language skills he moved to Rome where he quickly fell further in love with Italian food and culture. After responding to an ad for a WWOOFer (willing worker on organic farms) he moved to Emilia Romagna, home of Parma ham and parmigiano cheese, where he worked at an agriturismo outside Bardi, an agricultural town surrounded by the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines. Think rolling green hills and pretty woodlands, a fortress from the Middle Ages, porcini mushrooms in the autumn and wildflowers lining the roads in summer.

Why Ramarro?

A ramarro is a small, green lizard common across Italy. During long days in the field learning his trade, the ramarri became Oliver’s work companions, basking in the sun while he dreamed up a name for a business he wasn’t sure would ever exist. Although he worked on farms in Puglia and Sardinia too, his time in Bardi was formative. It always interests me that we ended up moving to a part of Victoria that resembles Bardi: surrounded by mountains, fertile soil, rolling green hills and plenty of European trees. On returning to Melbourne, Oliver became a restaurant manager, most notably running Cumulus Inc. and Supernormal with chef Andrew McConnell. He project-managed Marion wine bar and even ran Meatsmith for a while, so he has a unique understanding of the restaurants he now sells to. In 2013, we moved from a one-bedroom apartment in Carlton to our property in the Dandenong Ranges where our aim was only to have more space, start a family and grow our own veggies and fruit. But Oliver’s enthusiasm for growing meant that he was sowing the seeds of our future before we’d even left Carlton. And the rest – as they say – is history.

More about the early days of Ramarro Farm soon. Until then … eat well!

Words by Lisa Davis @by_lisa_davis

Eat seasonally with us

We’re farmers, not chefs, but we love to cook, and we love to eat and part of the fun of this newsletter for us will be the chance to share with you what we’re eating throughout the seasons. No doubt it’s stating the obvious to say we’re big believers in eating seasonally. There’s something so exciting about the build-up in anticipation we feel before a new crop is ready to eat. We long for tomatoes in the winter, but by the time Autumn rolls along we’re over them and desperate for our first radicchio salad with balsamic vinegar or our first plate of steamed purple sprouting broccoli simply dressed with olive oil and sea salt. This won’t be a newsletter of recipes (but we will link to recipes from the fantastic professionals that use our produce), it’s more an insight into what we’re growing, what we’re eating, who we are and even the foodie books we’re reading. A fortnightly slice of Ramarro life.

Roasted peppers with anchovies & fresh oregano

This week we’ve been enjoying the end of capsicum season with Janet’s peppers. Named for Oliver’s English aunty who made and loved this dish. Janet was a landscape architect who lived in a narrow five-storey home with clean lines and grand glazing. She was a generous host of long, leisurely lunches full of great food and wine. Oliver has fond memories of being pleasantly full after her lunches and sitting peacefully by the floor-to-ceiling windows watching the planes fly into Heathrow from the top floor of her North London home. We made Janet’s peppers recently when friends came for lunch and then saw a similar item on the menu at the new Florentino Cellar Bar, headed by chef Brendan Katich whom we’ve had the pleasure of working with at Nomad and Reine & La Rue for around six years now. We roast red bullhorn peppers (the long yellow capsicums we grow also work well) on the BBQ until they’re charred black, then cover in a bowl to sweat the skins off. Next we remove the seeds and arrange the now sweet and tender flesh on a serving dish, then drench in quality olive oil and top with the best anchovies we can find and a sprinkle of fresh oregano leaves. This week you’ll find some of the last capsicums of the season in our veg boxes available via our website for pick up from the farm or from Meatsmith Fitzroy.

And in case you’re wondering, our gorgeous plates come from design and food legends CIBI.

Coming up: all the reasons why we love puntarelle and how to prepare it.

Until next time … eat well!

Words by Lisa Davis @by_lisa_davis

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