Welcome friends!

Hello and welcome to Making friends with salad, a fortnightly newsletter packed full of inspiration for eating seasonally from the growers at Ramarro Farm. We’ve been selling fresh produce to Australia’s best restaurants for over a decade, but in recent years sales to our retail customers have soared. We’ve even brought back veg boxes! So this newsletter is for you: the home cooks who want more veg on their plates. We’re so glad you’re here! Having our produce used consistently by the country’s most talented chefs gives us a real buzz, but knowing the food we grow is making it onto your dinner plates and being shared by friends and families across Melbourne every week brings us profound joy and fulfilment.

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