Packed to the rafters

The hilbarn van Versace was packed to the rafters this week on Barn's home deliveries to Launceston - even the front seat was full. Sadly we can't do every delivery run ourselves which means we have to close the boxes for safe delivery. In this week's box: Graeme's lettuce and mint; silverbeet, baby spinach and coriander from Zong in Tea Tree; dutch cream potatoes and shallots from Scottsdale; apples and the last of the autumn raspberries from Hillwood and cauliflower and Savoy cabbage from Laurie in Lower Barrington. Next week: enjoy the last of Lyndy and David's certified organic garlic - it's proved a real hit this season. 

Ready to Jonquil

These jonquils could either be way too early or extremely late! We spotted them last Monday morning in the Windermere Cafe & Cellar Door garden, one of our Pick Up Points for East Tamar hilbarn customers. If you've never dropped in, make sure you do. It's a home away from home and owners Kerrie and Maree are always on the spot ready to put a spring in your step with great coffee, freshly made sandwiches, hot meals or a bottle of local Native Point sparkling wine. You can also arrange to have your hilbarn fresh produce box delivered there for free on Mondays and Thursdays - or choose one of our other Pick Up Points (listed at right) convenient to you. Might see you at the Windermere Cafe for happy hour one of these Fridays... 

New Delivery Days

That's Barn, taking a call from a customer to hold their boxes for a couple of weeks - they're off to Bali. What good timing, just as the southerly blows in! Barn and Versace are off now to deliver boxes for hilbarn's additional delivery days on Thursdays in Launceston and Fridays in Hobart. Enough of you had mentioned how you'd love a box for the weekend. So now you can start your week, or start the weekend, filling your fridge and pantry with local fresh produce. Just send us an email if you'd like to sign up to either end of the week (or both) to hilbarn@bigpond.com. And that's Harry the hilbarn dog who would have waved too if he could, as Versace headed out onto Pipers River Road for the short trip into town...Enjoy your day!

Truffles Are Coming

It's been three years since we started hilbarn fresh produce boxes and we wanted to say thank you for helping to spread the word through reading our blog. We know that many of our customers who've been with us for a long time really enjoy opening up "the surprise in a box" with each weekly or fortnightly delivery. And we love introducing them to the amazing diversity of the fresh produce we source from our Tasmanian growers, and to their stories. This month, Hil's story on Tamar Valley Truffles featured in Country Style's May edition with photographs by Tasmanian photographer Alan Moyle. We snapped the one of grower Marcus Jessup (photographed) during last year's truffle hunt where we learned that Tamar Valley Truffles are highly prized both in Australia and internationally. If you'd like to be truly adventurous and try this year's local truffle harvest, here's your chance. We are offering fresh Tamar Valley Truffles as optional extras in hilbarn boxes from mid June. That's when Marcus expects the season will start. If you're a hilbarn customer, let us know if you're interested and we'll send you more details.

Road Trips

It's no hardship travelling around the Tasmanian countryside picking up produce direct from the growers we meet for our hilbarn fresh produce boxes. And particularly when you turn a corner and see a scene like this: taken from the middle of a bridge over the South Esk River, on a phone camera, along the Nile Road south of Evandale.

Kitchen gardens (#1)

Thank you to Rod and Kim at Stillwater for inviting us to raid their restaurant kitchen garden last week featuring an amazing abundance of chillies. Here are Kim (top) and Rod's hands (sorry Rod, you were moving so fast our quick phone-snap was out of focus...), harvesting hatfuls of habaneros for last week's hilbarn boxes. We put one in every hilbarn box and had handfuls left over which Hil thought she'd use to make chilli oil. Question: how many habanero chillies to one bottle of peanut/olive oil? 

Going Nuts

It's sweet chestnut time again - love the smell of these nuts roasting... Thank you to to wonderful growers Colleen and Daryl from Preolenna, near Wynyard, for providing not only bags of chestnut joy but also tips on how to store and cook with them. Here are a couple of recipes from their treasure trove, generously shared with hilbarners. 


Chestnut Soup
500g chestnuts, cooked
2.5 cups  milk
7.5 cups chicken or vegetable stock
1 Tbs flour
1 Tbs butter
3 Tbs sherry (optional)
Puree chestnuts, add stock, milk and flour with melted butter and cook for 20 minutes stirring every now and then. Just before serving, add the sherry.

Chestnut Dip
250g chestnuts, peeled
Stock
Pinch salt & a little butter
20ml cream
Squeeze lemon juice
Fresh chives & crackers
Cook chestnuts in stock with just enough stock to cover. When cooked the liquid should be considerably reduced. Rub through a sieve or blend with a dash of water until a smooth puree is formed. Return puree to pan, add a pinch of salt and butter to thicken. Leave to cool. Add cream and lemon juice to the puree mixture and mix  until smooth. Sprinkle with chives and serve with crackers.

Autumnal Scene

It was a beautiful scene in the Holm Oak vineyard at Rowella as we wended our way around the gentle coves of the West Tamar last weekend to collect magnificent organic walnuts from Lucy and Chris for this week's hilbarn boxes. The twisted trunks were as shapely as dancers' legs, and the neat rows lined up as if they were about to start the Can-Can.  

Eggs Sunny Side Up

It was a perfect autumnal day when we turned off the Bass Highway and headed for Forth to meet Andrew (partner Caroline was on a trip to town) and their 200 hens. Their extremely friendly free range chooks fossick during the day alongside neighbouring echidnas, possums and wallabies on a combination of grassed paddocks and bush. As refugees from western Australia, the couple established their sustainable farm On The River Bank three years ago with the aim of supplying the local community with good quality, DPIPWE-approved free range eggs. While Andrew showed us through the hens' spacious sleeping and feeding quarters he explained how the girls are fed on a formulated chicken feed mix, produced locally by a fellow free-range egg producer, and how the paddocks are maintained without the use of chemicals, herbicides or pesticides. Andrew and Caroline's eggs feature in hilbarn boxes this week for people who tick the egg option.

Cheesy Matters

This morning started with an early pick of herbs from the hilbarn garden (left), still wet with a heavy overnight dew. Today, a racy selection of hardy rosemary, tender lavender (third cut!), silvery curry plant, river mint, variegated oregano, apple mint and common thyme, chosen to be sitting pretty on cheese platters at Yondover Goat Dairy.

We first met Gina and Mike Butler at the Lilydale Market selling their farmhouse cheeses, while we were selling herbs, plants and fresh produce. We heard about their plan to open a cheese tasting room at their goat dairy in nearby Tunnel.

Since then, the Butlers have appeared at markets across the State. They've opened their cafe and tasting room-with-a-view, made wonderful cheeses served on sumptuous platters (above, with a sprig of hilbarn lovage), and won one or or two impressive awards in the process. Like every primary producer, they work incredibly hard and deserve every success. We snapped a shot of one of their more curious and irresistible goats this morning while Gina and Mike were at market and Kellie was manning the tasting room.

Baked Quince

Autumn's quinces star in our double boxes this week. With thanks to Suzanne from nearby Lalla we've discovered a stunning way to eat quince - with cream. There's a recipe included in this week's double box, and we've shared it here for anyone else who might be interested.

Baked Quince

Peel quinces, cut in quarters, cover with water or wine and sugar (they usually need at least 1 cup sugar to 2 cups liquid), add a vanilla bean and some lemon juice. Bake fruit in a covered casserole, in a 150C oven for 4 hours or longer, until quince is deep red. Do not stir as the fruit may break up. Cool and serve as a dessert. Delicious with cream or icecream.

Recipe supplied kindly by Suzanne from Lalla

Young Hearts

We love meeting young people who share our passion for fresh produce. It's one of the things that helps us keep going. This weekend, we were rewarded meeting Bobby from Kindred at Devonport Farmer's Market, and Duncan from Underwood, who helped us pack hilbarn boxes on Sunday night. Thanks, guys! We hope to have some of Bobby, and mum Sandy's, freshly dug market stall produce in future boxes. And, Duncan, who told us half way through the evening "I love working", you are welcome back any time - if mum and dad don't mind.

Perfect Parsnips

We've never seen whiter parsnips than the ones we picked up from Sandra in Sassafras at the weekend for this week's hilbarn boxes. There's a good reason for that: the crop is grown on the river silt flood plains on the Mersey River rather than the red soils of Sassafras. Parsnips are hand-harvested to prevent bruising and gently washed before leaving the farm. We all commented on their elegance and purity as we packed them carefully into hilbarn boxes ready for delivery. We hope you appreciate the extra effort Sandra takes with the family's farm produce as much as we do; it looks like Sandra's daughters Lucy and Holly do too!

Thank You To All Our Growers

To Va and Pheng in Devonport, to Brett in Lower Barrington, to Steve in Flowery Gully, to Yuri, Johan and Nathalie in Kindred... to all our growers: we've loved finding you (and how you found us) along the way. We really appreciate what you do and how hard you work (often in the face of gross adversity). Thank you for being there at the end of the road to cheer our day and to inspire us to keep providing the freshest local produce we can find.

Roads Well Travelled

We love our trips each weekend to pick up fresh produce for hilbarn boxes. See how the roads are free and easy? How blue the sky is? How blissful is the route through fields, plains, bush and towns that we've come to know like the back of our hands. Tomorrow we're off to farming friends in Kindred and East Devonport, Hillwood and Lebrina, and we might stop in at the Jansz Wine Room in Pipers River on the way home for a refreshing half glass of bubbles. Have a wonderful long weekend, whatever road you might be travelling...

Pressing Matters

Apple season is upon us, and if, over the coming weeks, you have spare apples and would like them pressed, organic farmers John and Lesley are happy to offer the use of their handsome apple cider press (circa 1870). That's John in the photo with Rachel visiting from Nashville, USA, turning the gears and mashing the apples by hand. "It can be driven by a motor," says John, "but we find two people working on it can make about 2.5 litres an hour (with clean-up) and that's fast enough for us." Last year they used it to make Apple Cider Vinegar using the golden delicious apples grown on their Lilydale farm. This year, they're happy to press your apples - for a share of the juice of course.

Too Darn Hot?

These habanero chillis came from Steve in Beaconsfield who says they rate 10 on the hot chilli scale. "They're lively," he added. And he meant it. They are the black belt of chillis - hot AND flavorsome - and a surprising 64 times hotter than their slow lane cousin, the more conservative Jalapeno. Steve says if you ate one whole it would blow your head off - but only for seven minutes. After that, the hotness passes. He suggests that just one of these tiny taste grenades makes four to five family meals. We've given you two in this week's hilbarn box.

Sweet Pea Seeds

We harvested a surfeit of sweet pea seeds from the hilbarn garden this summer, and we'd like to share them with you. Their old-fashioned fragrance and purple and pink blossom make for a cheerful posy. When we first purchased them as a tiny packet of seeds from an old timer at the Longford flower show, we were told to plant them on St Patrick's Day. We've done this for the past five years: enjoyed their potent posi-ness and harvested their seeds for the following season - which have never let us down. So, with our amazing surplus, if you're a new customer and want to sign up to hilbarn fresh produce boxes, we'll send you a welcome packet of seeds in the post. Remember to plant them around March 17th.

Colours of Summer

As we go about and count the last of our summer days, her jewel colours can't help but inspire us: the rich yellow of our golden drop plums, the vibrant green of Alan's oak leaf and salanova lettuces collected for this week's hilbarn boxes; the luscious red of Colin and Jenny's tomatoes, filling a pan to make passata; and the dusty amethyst of drying poppies against a blue-sky backdrop in Wesley Vale. Treasure these colours - you won't see them again until next summer.

New Green Apples & Salt

When we collected the first green apples of the season from Millers in Hillwood, Mikon, who packed the boxes and comes from the Philippines, told us how she's always eaten Gravensteins with salt. Maybe they're an acquired taste, green apples with salt? Either way, it's great to have the first of the new season's apples in this week's hilbarn boxes. And if you don't like their tart taste, you can always use them as cookers. Or use sugar.

Savoy Joy

We travelled to the foothills of Mt Roland this morning to collect Laurie and Brett Connors' freshly harvested Savoy cabbage for this week's hilbarn boxes. Their wonderfully wrinkled layers of leaves looked a picture in the wooden pallet as we loaded them one by one into our van. Laurie had left the ticket for what we owed under a farm rock on one side, but was there to meet us anyway with a cheerful face, plucky stories, and the firmest, large-handed handshake we've ever met.

Harvest Scene - Updated

We set off early this morning to pick up fresh produce from Devonport, Frankford, Flowery Gully and Hillwood. It's been an amazing season for hay, with many farmers reporting nearly twice as much as their normal summer yield. Round bales littered the countryside en route like giant billiard balls, but it was the paddock of old-fashioned stocks that caught our eye. We're going to do some digging to try and track down the farmer who still harvests hay in the traditional way.

Update Monday: Just got off the phone to Pam and Bevan who own the farm where we saw these piles of stacked up hay. "Stooks, not stocks", corrects Pam. Oops, of course! Pam and Bevan are third generation farmers from East Devonport, growing cabbages for seed, poppies and hay for chaff. Which is where the stooks come in. Apparently stook hay makes better chaff. "I don't know why, I'm not a horse," said Pam. "They're fussy creatures!" Pam says her husband, Bevan, was selling chaff to some local old timers who inspired him to cut his paddock in this old-fashioned way for the first time last year. One of them had an old binder which is what's used to make the stooks. Each stook consists of six or seven stacks (or sheaves) of hay which is stood up to dry, then rounded into bales and sold for premium chaff. "It took such a long time, we thought we'd be here til June," says Pam. Friends and family pitched in, though, and now the paddock on the side of the Bass Highway is attracting tourists from near and far. "Everyone wants to take photos," says Pam, adding that the best viewing point is from the flyover - unless you can fly. That, she says, would give you the best view of all.

Shed Fashion

Sunday nights are for packing at the hilbarn shed. Each week is different. It starts slowly and mindfully, while the four of us decide what goes on the bottom and how each item will fit together. We think about colour and crushability, and whether or not an item needs packaging in brown paper or plastic bags, or otherwise wrapped in newspaper. We like there to be as little fuss and wrapping as possible - only what's necessary to keep an item fresh or from spoiling others in the box - as if it's just been picked or harvested. Once we've settled into the way and how of packing, and the task is understood without hard thinking, the conversation moves to how our week was spent, to recipes tried, or friends enjoyed. And to having a laugh. So when Rhonda turned up in cut-off trackies and farm boots we couldn't resist a snap. This is Rhonda, showing off the latest in Shed Fashion. We aren't the most glamorous puss in boots in town, but on a 25 degree day, it's cool and comfortable and that's what counts.

How To Keep Basil

Graeme and Kym's beautiful hydroponically-grown basil plants filled the van with an intoxicating aroma when we picked them up on Saturday morning to pack in this week's boxes. Just letting you know, if you keep your basil plant on the kitchen windowsill in a glass of water (don't let it go dry) it will last for a couple of weeks at least. Not that we expect it to last that long at all; now is the time for basil with everything! Ever tried Basil Ice Cream?

Cherries On Top

Last year, Pete's cherries, grown in the cool climes of Mt Arthur in Lilydale, were devastated by an unseasonally wet summer. This year, we found Pete in a very happy mood. He says it's one of his best cherry seasons yet, and it's only just begun. Yesterday, we picked up boxes of Pete's freshly picked "William's Favourites", an early variety, and took them straight home to weigh and pop into brown paper bags for this week's hilbarn boxes. We love the way they look and taste like a bag of sweets. Come back in a couple of weeks, said Pete, for the Ron Seedling variety, a large dark red cherry that ripens later in the season. Then, as we were leaving and the sun was setting over Lilydale and the western Tiers, he introduced us to last year's vintage homemade cherry wine - happily shared. Thank you, Pete and Betty, for a cherry season like no other.

Courgette or Zucchini?

Thanks to Tim from Latrobe who provided the zucchini in this week's hilbarn box. You can see it growing here in Tim's great shot of the unmistakable countryside of Tassie's Central Coast. "What's your favourite way of eating your zucchini," we asked him. "I'll send you a recipe," he said. And by the time we got home and unpacked, the recipe had arrived. Here it is, happy to share it with you, especially as we tried it out last night after packing this week's hilbarn boxes. Try it - it works!

ZUCCHINI SLICE

Ingredients:

2 large or 3 med zucchini, grated coarsely

1 large onion, chopped

2 rashers bacon or some ham, chopped finely

1 cup grated cheese

1 cup self raising flour

Half cup olive oil

5 – 6 eggs

Salt & Pepper

Method:

Combine zucchini, onion, bacon, cheese, flour, oil and lightly beaten eggs. Season.

Pour into greased 20cm x 20cm tin

Bake at 350F for 30 – 40 minutes

Nice hot or cold

hilbarn in 2012

We've spent the last two weeks looking up at busy summer clouds while we rested. Now we're back, ready for hilbarn in 2012, with Graeme's lettuce picked so fresh this morning it's still wearing raindrops; Colin and Jenny's tomatoes, Tim's zucchini (recipe to follow shortly), Dave's organic garlic, and Sara's piles of plums from her garden just up the road that Benny and James have just helped us bag, ready for our first pack of the year this evening. Our "blue sky thinking" for this year? Sharing even more of the same wonderful fresh Tasmanian produce with you. We'd love you to spread the word. As Graeme told us today: "a happy customer makes a happy grower "!