The winter table

Well friends, I think we saw the sun for about an hour on Saturday. It was grim. Not to mention a little spooky given the misty soup we were going about our day in. Radicchio loves the cold, but the rest of our veg is largely grown inside unheated greenhouses. If it’s cold and the sun comes out, there’s no problem. Without the sun things move at a snail’s pace. We have plenty of lettuce in the ground, we’d love to sell it, but the plants are just too small. And even though we did have one gloriously sunny day on Sunday, rain is forecast for the whole of this week. If it sounds like we’re obsessed by the weather, we kind of are. It means everything to a farmer. This week on the farm, we harvested our first proper crop of kiwi fruit and now we wait for them to ripen on the kitchen bench. The team have been refreshing the rhubarb beds, and we’ve made the final adjustments to the structure we built to net our summer blueberries. Bring on January!

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