Pepper pricing

One subject that often crops up when people are filling in the survey is that of Australian food products being very expensive and out of the reach of many people who have to manage on fixed incomes.

I understand this concern. I am no stranger to the idea of living on a fixed income.

I realised when searching the internet for Australian produced pepper – I’m never going to find it in the supermarkets – I had found a product priced to support their argument.

The price of imported black peppercorns on the supermarket shelves in the local foursome range , depending on the amount purchased and whether it is on special,from forty to maybe fifty cents per ten grams.

Compare this with the online price of Australian grown peppercorns. At this site, which I am using for the purpose of the exercise, 150g whole black aussie pepper plus the delivery cost, totals $20.50. Do the sums. This particular Australian grown item is only going to appeal to those people with stacks of disposable income.

I am pleased with my decision which allows a very generous lead time for this project. There is no way I am going to be paying that price for an Australian product. At this moment in time, 2014 looks very much like being black pepper free for ten days each month.

Not a prospect I am looking forward to, quite frankly.

Organics in Inverloch

This afternoon I took the magnifying glass down to Greenheart Organics in Inverloch and examined the produce closely. I was looking for Australian products, of course, and although there may be one or two items on this list where the ingredients may need closer examination, the following are up for further consideration.

Here is the list of products that made it into the Ausfood notebook.

Almonds
Apple Cider Vinegar
Brown rice
Dried Apple Wedges
Dried Apricots
Mock Red Hill Bio-dynamic Apple Cider Vinegar
Oat Flour
Pecans
Polenta
Quick Oats
Roasted Peanuts
Rolled Spelt
Rye Flour
Sunflower Seeds
Tasmanian Quinoa
Unhulled Buckwheat
Walnuts in Shells
Wholemeal Flour

There are definitely some items on this list which won’t be found in either of the duopoly supermarkets.

I would be delighted to find vinegar to add some variety to the salad dressing but I suspects if I read the labels carefully for the one listed it will have some form of cultures on the ingredient list.

Cultures?  Where on earth do cultures come from? I will have to investigate this matter further.

Two purchases

After quite a lengthy time wandering around the shop and examining any product that looked worthy of examination I finally came away with two purchases.

Yes, only two.  Spelt pasta and cracked wheat.

The pasta, when I get around to using it, will be a new experience.  There are no cooking instruction. It's my intention to use it when I find ingredients that might fit in with a tomato sauce that I often put over pasta in the summertime.  I usually use tinned tomatoes, but it is difficult to find Australian tinned tomatoes and when I do they have additives which might come from who knows where. Eating by numbers again.

The cracked wheat will be used for tabbouli and I don't forsee any problems with ingredients as most of them will be fresh produce: tomatoes, mint, parsley and cucumber.

The woman behind the counter must have been pleased when I finally made my purchases and left the shop. She kept watching me like a hawk and maybe considered I was some poor old down and out who was about to stuff some goods under her jacket and run out the door.

Run out the door.  A chance would be a fine thing.

One thing leads to another

Today the path to the ice-cream shop leads me to a gum tree. A Gum Tree with capital letters.

The Gum Tree is a rather fancy food store in Albert Park, stocking a vast range of goods that might appeal to those lucky enough to have a vast amount of disposable income. The disposable suggestion was prompted by the startling difference in the price of Murray River Salt Flakes as compared with prices in supermarkets.

In my search for Australian produced/grown food there is no limit to the upper or lower end of the price scale. Any produce vendor is fair game as far as I am concerned.

I head in the door in a brisk and businesslike manner and start the usual search. My first inspection stop is just inside the front door, where the fruit and vegetables are displayed. I speak to Ben who is stacking the shelves and generally making the display look appealing. In answer to my question about Australian grown produce he tells me that their produce is always labelled. I look along the rows and see little evidence, apart from pre-packaged goods, that this is the case.

I always find this disappointing but by now I know the inevitable answer to a question about lack of labelling. Invariably the answer is framed, more or less, about the time and cost taken to label the produce. An answer, which is more often than not, is delivered in a defensive and irritated manner.

I must make it quite clear this was not the response at the Gum Tree today.

My main mission in this store is to enquire about the availability of compressed yeast. I think my chances of this product being available are zero and in this respect I am not disappointed. Ben does suggest I might make enquiries at the South Melbourne market and I am very pleased to at least have a pointer in some direction.

It’s always a good thing to have a search prospect ahead of me.

Sultanas, yes. Apricots, no

Just when you thought you had heard the last on the subject of breakfast muesli, it makes a return.

Yes folks, I am revisiting the muesli jar and the last two bothersome items. Sultanas and dried apricots.

Both sultanas and dried apricots fall under the heading of dried fruit and although you might think either of these would be readily available on the supermarket shelves as an Australian product, this is not so.

Sultanas are more easily found than apricots. At the moment imported dried apricots rule on the supermarket shelves; it might be possible to find some Australian dried apricots but the ingredient labels will invariably read ‘local and imported ingredients’. How much is local content and how much is imported is anybody’s guess. Turkey seems to lead the way with the imported products and Turkish dried apricots are easily identifiable by their plump shape and bright golden colour.

All of the above has led to dried apricots being moved to the too-hard basket for the moment. And being temporarily removed from the breakfast muesli ingredient list. I use the word temporarily; I am at my optimistic best today and like Mr Micawber, I live in hope that “something will turn up” in the local dried apricot line.

Sultanas on the other hand may be imported or they may be marked ‘Australian sultanas’ on the packaging but sitting right next to those two words it will be the words canola oil, with no country of origin identification. Vegetable oil of one type or another often appears as part of the ingredients description on dried fruit packaging. While the consumer may think they are buying only sultanas (or currants, or raisins) they will invariably find they are buying an extra such as the vegetable oil, which is used to glaze the fruit, reducing its moisture loss and maintaining product quality.

I’m not interested in whether oil has been added to my sultanas and I am less than impressed to find yet another ingredient whose origin cannot be traced.

Yet another cause to get the magnifying glass out and run it over the labelling.

Addressing Dressing

The idea of using white wine vinegar, apple cider vinegar or balsamic vinegar when making a salad dressing has run into the usual brick wall. A long leisurely look along the shelves in the supermarket reveals almost without exception that all vinegar is imported. Italy seems to have a stranglehold on the vinegar available in supermarkets for the home consumer.

Vinegar produced in Australia? Zilch. Nada. Nothing.

I’m not happy about this state of affairs. I take myself off to the nearest Leo’s supermarket and start the process all over again. This time I hit pay-dirt in the form of Maggie Beer’s Aged Red Wine Vinegar. What a relief to be able to find an Australian product that allow me to make something as simple as salad dressing.

Hurrah for Maggie Beer.




The other alternative to vinegar is lemon juice. No problems here with lemon juice; lemons are readily available and the only drawback is if you are in a rush you have to juice the lemons. Life’s tough isn't it?

I am however, sorry that I can’t find a balsamic vinegar that is not a product of some other country, usually Italy. I quite like to use it as an alternative in salad dressing through the summer. And with strawberries, of course.


As for oil for the salad dressing. That’s easy and straightforward. Cobram Olive Oil is my choice. There are many varieties of home grown olive oil and nearly as many price variations. The Trash Palace Kitchen is not a place where price – although it may well reflect quality in many cases – is the criterion. As long I can stick with the most recent harvest, Cobram will be the basis of my salad dressings.


Simple. And time saving. No wandering along the supermarket aisles, looking at this type of vinegar and that type of vinegar and then having to make a decision.

Red wine vinegar at that supermarket, olive oil at the local supermarkets and lemons at any of the aforementioned.

Wandering in the Ausfood wilderness

I've now spent nearly eight weeks reading labels and putting together the foundation of my Ausfood cupboard.

While on the one hand I am greatly encouraged about the availability and labelling of some Australian food products I am now becoming aware of certain confusing aspects of food labelling that needs to be approached with some caution.

A particular item, let’s say for the argument, might be tomato paste or might be canola oil, will have the same brand name but will be labelled product of Australia on one size container and labelled as an imported product in another. Or it might be a combination of imported and local products. This makes life difficult and means that every time you buy this item you need to read the label if you want to be sure you are buying Australian.

What really irks me is tomato paste; I have found that multiples of two or four packs may have no identifying country of origin at all. Multiple packs of tomato paste require a great deal of application when reading the labels, even for some-one dedicated to the cause!!. I fail to understand all the discrepancies but I am sure the food manufacture has a perfectly good reason for stuffing around with the labelling process regarding country of origin.

There – I've got all that off my chest. Now I can move on to another grouch because Grouchland is where I am headed today.

At this stage I am becoming more aware of the number of ingredients that might be found in something as simple as flour, especially when you move away from plain flour. These are usually additives which keep the flour fresh and easy to use, no sifting and in the case of SR flour the raising agents are numbers. As for buying plain flour and adding the raising agents yourself – forget it – I am yet to find on any supermarket shelves any raising agents manufactured in Australia. Only bi-carb soda is a product of Australia; cream of tartar and baking soda come from some other place.

Meat is labelled in the duopoly supermarkets because it is packaged but even this rule of thumb cannot be applied to all other supermarkets where labelling is haphazard and in the case of the butchers shop with meat cut and displayed in cases no mention is made of country of origin at all.

Any questions about this bring the curt response of all our meat is Australian. I am mystified why supermarkets seem to have one labelling system for meat but this doesn't seem to apply to your standard butcher shop. Huh?

As I could go on at length on this topic I will close off by putting fruit and veggie vendors under the label magnifying glass. Once again the duopoly labels their products but not all the other supermarkets follow this practice. The more consumer oriented green grocers will identify their products but the only products easily identified in the smaller shops will be the packaged products.

Country of origin product labelling? What a confusing tangle for the ordinary shopper.

In the hours between midnight and dawn

Some evenings I listen to the radio before dropping off to sleep. Sometimes it happens I doze off and hours later I am woken by the sound of the presenter’s voice going on about something. One night a week or so back, I heard the words: sheep, wheat, barley oats and dairy, in no particular order.

This was enough to stop me from reaching out and turning the radio off. I tuned in. I listened for a minute or two and then reached out for my trusty notebook and pen. The program was about Australian produced food and the program might well have been presented especially for me.

First up was an interview with a representative from the Rural Industries Research And Development Corporation. The talk then ranged over many topics, truffles and essential oils in Tasmania, bush tomatoes in Central Australia and broad scale farming. Tasmania grows saffron, wasabi and quinoa; all very well, but not items that you would find on the shelves in my pantry.

Here in Victoria we have the Meredith Dairy yogurt and Shaw’s buffalo mozzarella and yogurt. I have tried both the Meredith Dairy sheep yogurt and the Shaw’s buffalo yogurt and I like them both but I would say  Meredith wins in the taste stakes by a short half head.

Queensland produces a number of more exotic food items, such as dragon fruit with its bright red skin, white flesh and black seeds. Vanilla pods, tomato peppers (small, round, red peppers looking very much like a tomato) and finger limes also come from Queensland.

And coffee. In Queensland. This will definitely be investigated.

Every state grows olives and Australia produces good quality olive oil. The conversation, which is now talk-back, moves on to ramble around from eel farming, to native fish in water filled disused open cut mines and an old chap on King Island who talks about seaweed which was once used for gelatine. Beach cast kelp is still harvested and milled for export to Scotland, but not I suspect for food purposes.

A new crop of Australian food, the Kakadu plum, seems to be the food of the moment and is referred to as a super crop. An online search for the dictionary definition of super food informs me it is:

a nutrient-rich food considered to be especially beneficial for health and well-being.

When the talk wanders off to other places where people take the opportunity to promote their host farms and suggest olive growing is a tax dodge, I lose interest and I reach out and press the off button.

Saved by Emma and Tom

Today I had agreed to walk up to the local shops with one of my neighbours for a long overdue coffee and catch-up.

What I had totally forgotten was, until we were halfway to the small shopping centre, that starting with breakfast today, I was well and truly on my way through another day of eating only Ausfood.

Well damn it!!

I was not about to turn back and I was not going to quit my Ausfood day and start all over tomorrow. There are now only four days left in March and I really can’t afford to fritter one of them away. Lessons to be learned here – start the Ausfood eating schedule early in the month – don’t leave it to the last minute.

The worst that could happen would be to sit with a glass of cold water in front of me on the table and quite possibly, Andy the barista might fall down in a dead faint on the floor when I do not order a coffee.

Neither of these worst case scenarios eventuated.

Inside the coffee shop, near the front door, sits the cold cabinet and inside it an array of cold drinks are on offer. At first glance it seems the only things available are all the usual soft drink and fruit juice suspects, who shall remain nameless. Closer examination, which means holding the fridge door open, which effectively blocks the doorway for new customers, and peering closely at the shelves brings a result.

I find a selection of Emma and Tom’s fruit juices; scanning the labels I consider my best option will be the Straight OJ - 100% orange juice. Turning the bottle around the words ‘made in Australia from the best ingredients we can find in Australia’ seal the deal. This orange juice will be the coffee replacement for today.

Emma and Tom save the day!!

The pepper chase

Sourcing Australian grown pepper is still simmering away on the back burner of my mind.  I have looked on line but as the words I use in the search engine define the result I get on the screen and it might be that I am not using exactly the right words to find the right results.  

What I did find today on the display shelves of the local library, was a wonderful book, Pepper by Christine McFadden.   

In this book there are chapters on the history of pepper, the pepper trade, another on the varieties of pepper and their origins and there are eleven chapters of recipes where pepper is always one of the ingredients.  The usual salads, soup, fish, poultry, meat and vegetable recipes are there together with the not-so-usual recipes which include pepper as an ingredient in drinks, desserts, cakes and biscuits. 

As intriguing as all the above might sound, I was on the lookout for any hint of the availability of Australian black pepper.  Looking in the index under A for Australia netted a zero result.  And then on pages 58 & 59 under the heading the great pepper family (there are 11 species listed here) I finally found an Australian related pepper.  Tasmannnia lanceolata is the common name for mountain pepper or Tasmanian pepper.   The description box informs me the leaves and berries can be used fresh or dried; the leaves have a lemony taste but care is needed as the flavour, although sweet at first, intensifies and becomes pungent and numbing.

 I will look for Tasmanian pepper berries at a later date, but it is not what I am looking for right at this moment. I want to find  Australian grown black peppercorns.   

At the very back of the book I find two possible sources here in Australia - Herbie's Spices and Vic Cherikoff Food Services. I put aside this brilliant book, full of pepper facts and figures, fantastic photographs and appealing recipes and turn to search the Internet. In a brief search I find one online source for Australian grown peppercorns and as might be expected cost is a significant factor here.  

Reluctantly I return Australian produced peppercorns to the back burner.

Impulse buying

I must be more careful in future when I spy some new item on the supermarket shelves.

Looking to expand the selection of oils in the Ausfood cupboard from its single current occupant, the bottle of olive oil, I set out in supermarket search mode for another oil product.

What excitement !! There sitting on the shelves at the Eastern IGA was a lovely bottle of Australian peanut oil. The map of Australia with the words 100% Australian hooked me right away; the ingredient description left me in no doubt about the contents of the bottle. It’s a smaller sized bottle which is good; small sizes are best when trying out something new.

This is just what I am looking for these days; it ticks all the Ausfood boxes.

The bottle is off the shelf, in the shopping basket and out through the register in the blink of an eye.

I’m about to put it in the Ausfood cupboard at home and it dawns on me that I have very hastily bought a bottle of oil most often used in Asian recipes. Ah, I see problems here with ingredients for an Asian recipe. I’m thinking soy sauce, Chinese rice wine and chilli paste just for starters.

A sober moment arrives in the Trash Palace kitchen as I contemplate how I will use up this lovely oil.

Billabong Apple Crunchy

One of the products I discovered yesterday while in Clementine’s, was a small packet of dried organic apple.

I found it on the bargain/reduction shelf and took advantage of the price to try it out. I liked it so much I went right back in my class break to get a couple more packets.

Dried apple is a good snack food although it's possible that some prospective buyers might think there is not enough quantity for the price paid.

The labelling gets the Big Tick from me, it states the apple is 100% Australian Made, Owned an Grown. These packets of dried apple come from Yarrawalla in Victoria. I had no idea where Yarrawalla was so what do you think I did?

Yes, I Googled the map. And this is what I found when I typed in Smiths Road, Yarrawalla and zoomed in using the Earth version.


Does this look like a bird’s eye view an apple orchard to you?

Bread

I previously posted about bread and its country of origin labelling exemption here. This labelling exemption places bread ingredients and their country of origin in the realm of the Great Unknown as far as this Ausfood blog is concerned.

In my naiveté and enthusiasm I considered making my own bread would be the next best and easiest thing to do. I’ve made bread on a small scale at the Trash Palace, an enterprise I’ve always enjoyed. I even know where my favoured bread recipes are - in the loose leaf piling system, of course. These are recipes which have always turned out a reliable result.

So, full of the business of getting down to the prospect of toast at breakfast time, I scurried off to the supermarket.

I came home a very disappointed person.

The item on the shopping list which caused me the greatest disappointment was yeast.

I searched in every supermarket in my locality, within walking distance of the Trash Palace, and drew a blank. Four blanks to be exact, one for every supermarket whose shelves I inspected.

The only yeast available, as you might expect, is the dried variety. The great disappointment was finding, of the three brands available, two were imported products and the third brand was disinclined to disclose the origins of their yeast product. To pass muster in the great Ausfood ingredient search the packaging must clearly state the country of origin, with Australia is the preferable country of origin; on all counts none of these products qualify.

Compressed, or fresh yeast, is an alternative, but in this 21st century, where speed and ease of preparation prevails in the kitchen, it is highly unlikely I will be able to find this product anywhere, let alone on supermarket shelves.

I see a big search project looming.

Random thoughts

It seems clear to me, even at this early stage in the search, there will be some items of food which will be crossed off the Ausfood list, as they are not likely to be produced in this country.

Curry, cranberry and chocolate for starters.

Chocolate is a disappointment.  I am quite partial to the taste of chocolate, whether it is in cakes, desserts or in the block. There are a few variations on the theme when it comes to chocolate and I will look at these as a separate issue in a later post.

Curry relies on imported spices, so spicing up dishes looks to be out of the question on Ausfood days.

Cranberries are not grown in Australia in commercial quantities and cranberry products in Australia are usually imported from the North American continent. These are the top 5 cranberry producing countries in the world according to this website – as you can see, no countries south of the equator make it into the top five.

There are however a few candidates for Ausfood days which seem to occur with monotonous regularity as I leaf through recipe books and my loose leaf piling system.

They are chicken and lemon and usually in combination. This time of the year salads are a favourite and as a fresh food product, the only limitation on salad is availability and creativity.

And let’s not overlook eggs in their many variations; all good, especially on the breakfast menu.

As sweet as

Honey was one of the ingredients listed on my first February Ausfood Day; I used it as a sweetener on my breakfast cereal.

This is a very special Tasmanian honey which I was lucky enough find when I was on holiday in Tasmania last November; it was on the counter in a small general store on the north-west coast.

 It is Tasmanian Manuka honey and I searched ‘you-know-where’ and found the following information on this website.

Here is the gist of it – I have put up the abbreviated version to spare you the details of the extra-ordinary number of disorders which Manuka honey may alleviate. However, if disorders are high on your daily agenda, please feel free to look at the website.

Manuka Honey is a premium product with a distinctive flavour and a dark amber colour. Manuka honey has a darker and richer taste than clover honey and has strong antibacterial and anti-fungal properties.
Manuka honey is a unique type of mono-floral honey produced by bees gathering nectar predominantly from flora found on the Tea Tree bush (Leptospermum scoparium), which is indigenous to New Zealand and the drier east coast of Australia. Manuka (from Māori 'mānuka') is the plant’s common name in New Zealand, also known as 'tea tree' in Australia.
Research has recognize that Manuka Honey contains very commanding antibacterial, antimicrobial, antiviral, antioxidant, antiseptic, anti-inflammatory and anti-fungal properties, making it extremely effective and may assist with a wide variety of health issues.

There are vast tracts of tea-tree on the west coast of Tasmania and no doubt the bees have a busy time in the flowering season making this honey. The beekeeper is one Russell Kay; no other details were provided on the container label.

I am here to tell you this honey is wonderful; as described above it is a dark colour and it does have a distinctive flavour – maybe a little too strong for some tastes - but I found it the perfect topping over plain yoghurt on my breakfast muesli.

I intend to keep it for special occasions, and as honey has a long shelf life, it is my aim to make it last until my next visit to Arthur River.

Med sensation.... or is it?

I recently discovered another variety of pear in my local Green supermarket.

The label description - hand written - read Med Sensation; it is a well formed pear with a red blush.

A day or so later I see this fruit in the local Green supermarket again. This time it is labelled Red Sensation. Aha, a labelling error.

I search on the internet for more information and I learn it is a medium size pear with a distinct red and gold colour and is available from February to the end of May.

It is also possible it is only new to me. This variety, according to some sources, is part of the Bartlett pear family and has been around nearly as long as I have!!

Further along in the fruit display at the supermarket, I am highly amused to find a pack of William Bartlett pears with what appears to be a interloper nestled in among all the other small golden pears.

 

It looks suspiciously like a Red Sensation. What scallywags these new arrivals are – cosying up to some of the forty-second cousins.

Last minute find

I doubt very much that finding a packet of Australian grown sunflower seeds in the supermarket would move too many people to a state of excitement.

So I can lay claim to being both surprised and delighted to find, after very careful searching for the umpteenth time, a packet of sunflower seeds with those all-important words Product of Australia printed on the packaging, in one of my local IGA supermarkets.

This will give a much needed boost to my breakfast cereal come the next Ausfood day, which is just around the corner.

As well as the sunflower seeds, sometime called kernels – and probably a more accurate description – I had another find in a Red Supermarket. I found Australian grown peanuts in their shells, packaged under the store label, and I promptly bought a packet.

These will serve me well as snacks throughout the day and although it may be seen as a time consuming and messy approach to snack food, the end result is 100% peanuts and no other ingredient to blur the issue.

Two new finds on one week. Good result eh?

Milk...................

Three ingredients make up my cup of tea.

Tea. Water. Milk.

I’ll get water out of the way immediately; as you might well guess, the water comes out of the tap and is supplied from nearby reservoirs. The word imported does not apply to any mention of the water in this blog.

Good. I’ve got that matter out of the way.

Now let’s move on to one of the other two ingredients. Milk.

Milk appears in supermarkets and other shops in many guises but today in the world of Ausfood the band is narrowed to the variety produced by cows; whole milk and reduced fat milk. The fat may be reduced slightly or it may be reduced altogether, though strictly speaking the words there should be removed altogether. Or fat free.






In the Green Supermarket, my first research area, I find four major brands of milk; Pura, Pauls, a2 and the store brand. Within those four brands there is a multiplicity of varieties – Tone No Fat, Light Start, Smarter White, Rev, and lactose free, just to name a few.





The list could go on but I am interested only in milk which is a product of Australia and to which nothing has been added. No vitamins, for example. Where do the vitamins come from? In drums or are they freeze dried and arrive as air cargo on freight planes from distant parts of the world?

 I am only interested in the ingredient milk, whose components may be milk and milk solids.

I find the Green Supermarket sets the standard for the other three supermarkets in my research area; the only changes being the brand names for the store brands, according to whichever supermarket I am researching. I do notice that an overwhelming amount of milk on the shelves in the Red Supermarket is the store brand. It is invariably cheaper and is the dominant presence on the shelves. In addition the Red Supermarket has Great Ocean Road milk, produced at Warrnambool; this brand is also cheaper than the regular brands.

At the IGA supermarkets the milk shelves follow the same general pattern as the duopoly but with the usual variations in the store affiliated milk products.

Happily, as might be expected, all milk bears the stamp Product of Australia.

..................... with your tea?

Researching the tea shelves was an exercise in learning that a tea may be produced in one country but it can be packed somewhere else entirely. And not all tea comes from China, though Mr Twining’s special selection teas seem to favour China.

There are quite a few varieties of black teas stocked on the shelves of my four local supermarkets, most of which would be recognised by any respectable tea drinker. In no particular order I found Bushells, Dilmah, Tetley, Lipton, Madura, Taylor’s of Harrogate and Billy Tea.

Tea-bags are most popular but for those die-hards tea drinkers who maintain loose leaf is best, most brands carry a loose leaf range. The tea may be a blend and it may be grown in India or Sri Lanka and it may be packed in Indonesia or the United Arab Emirates.

And an Australian grown black tea? Only one 100% Australian grown tea. Nerada. I  found this variety in January when I wrote this post and this current closer look at the shelves stocking tea in the supermarkets hasn’t revealed anything new. Those readers who might be interested in the history of Nerada Australian tea can find out more here.

Madura also grows tea here in Australia but it is packaged and sold as a blend of local and imported teas. Close, but no cigar.

As for Billy Tea and its Campfire Brew and the claim it has been traditionally Australian since 1885? Close examination of the label shows it is an imported tea with very clever labelling which might lead people to think it is an Australian tea. Not so.

Ah well, one Australian produced tea is better than none at all.

Another source of information

As I browse through the Epicure section of the Age this morning, while enjoying a coffee at my local coffee hang-out, I make two Ausfood discoveries.

I find two Victorian products which might well qualify for the Ausfood Challenge.

The first is Long Lane Capers, who are located near Mansfield in country Victoria. Capers are not high on the list of essential ingredients to be found in my kitchen cupboard but as time passes I may find them a useful addition. As spices produced in this country appear to be virtually non-existent, I may need to resort to capers now and then to add a bit of zing to a recipe.

I look at their web page and find a recipe for Caponata. I have never heard of this dish so I will be searching for more information. The caponata recipe looks to tick all the Ausfood boxes so I will file it away for future reference.

Next on the discovery list is Just Go Nuts, who have pistachios. They don’t appear to have a web page so I scroll through all the Google offerings to see what I can find. As well as pistachios and in-season avocados, they also have blood oranges. I will have to get along to a farmers market where they sell their wares and find out more. I also find their produce is available on-line through Farmers Direct – but that old problem rears its head – I can’t read the label before I buy the product.

I'm rather partial to pistachios and would be very happy to find a local supply.

And finally a more fanciful idea – that of a coffee farm. An at-home coffee farm, either in the back yard or on the deck, patio or balcony.   The Melbourne Food and Wine Festival is on soon and The Urban Coffee Farm and Brew Bar will have coffee trees for sale at $25 per tree. The idea is amusing and they would maybe make an interesting deck or patio plant but as for waiting for the first harvest. I wouldn’t be holding my breath.

I will, however, be looking at each week’s edition of Epicure to learn the latest on what produce is available and where it is available.