Strawberry forever: The delights of an organic garden are shared with young and old. Picture: Frankieb

Vegetable patches can be surprisingly social places.  Ours is especially so as it is in our front garden.

These days I spend time in the mornings and evenings pottering about.  It is fun to inspect all the changes taking place.  

While I am out there, I get to wave to neighbours driving by.  It is common for our immediate neighbours to stroll over for a chat.

Even people I don’t know will slow down just to gaze at a thriving vegetable patch and wave at the resident gardener. 

People are interested in organic gardens.  One neighbour told me she loves the smell of our garden as she walks by. “It is so refreshing”, she told me this morning.

I understand what she means.  I find seeing and smelling real food growing is soothing to my soul.  Food is about our basic survival – its very presence reassures.

My favourite garden smell is the aroma of tomato and basil plants after they have been watered or picked.

Every few days over the summer, my one and a half year old neighbour comes over and together we pick and eat the strawberries.  “More strawberries!  More strawberries!” she declares with her cheeky baby grin. 

I have friends who drop by to help harvest and use the incredible silverbeet.  It is a great feeling to send someone off loaded up with fresh produce from your own garden.

It isn’t just people who are drawn to our garden.  If we are out there the cats will join us and play chasey around the garden beds.  I am grateful they are ineffective and disinterested hunters.

The native trees that form a border around the garden attract lots of birds.  I think of them as my gardening partners.  I see them fluttering about feeding on insects.  

It feels good to know there is nothing out there on the plants that will harm any anyone. 

This is especially true as a thriving organic garden, just like serving a home cooked meal, is wonderful way of drawing people together.

The name risotto dances off the tongue and gives you a bounce in your step just by saying it – risotto.

This is the full breast of all rice dishes. Warm, smooth and deeply comforting.

Take out the homemade organic stock that you have squirreled away in your freezer.

Get ready to let time stand still – breathe slowly now – there is no hurry.

Fire up the stove and prepare to stay a while and warm yourself.

Stir like this is all that there is to do in the world.

Serve this dish to the people you love – a warm hug in a bowl.

With shavings of parmesan, cracked pepper and a glass of wine.

Simple comfort food in a world of worry and fear.

You will find life is not so complicated.

It is about real food shared with people you love.

Risotto stirring up memories of simple times.

When people understood what mattered about being alive.

Ladies and gentlemen select your perfect partner for a quiet night in.

Risotto.

As I drop in my chicken carcasses and twigs of this and that herb I wonder whether I was a witch in a previous life. It is so comforting to fill the kitchen with steam and promising aromas.

This thought gets me wondering about the killing off of witches in the Middle Ages. Was this really the wiping out of a whole generation of women who understood how to build flavor?

British cooking, in particular, has taken centuries to recover the notion of any flavour in cooking.

It soothes me to make organic stock and store it away. It is wonderful to know that the flavour I am adding to my soups, stews and curries comes from real food rather than fake laboratory versions.

The boiling up of bones, vegetables, herbs and even sea vegetables helps me boost the nutritional value of the meals prepared with my stock.

I give thanks, too, that there is no longer any danger of being hauled away and burnt at the stake for just making a great meal.

Wholesome: Let them eat cake. Picture: ulterior epicure

Four weeks after having spinal surgery my daughter baked a chocolate cake.

It wasn’t easy – she needed me and some industrial pain killers – but bake she did.

Some people find their passion early in life; my daughter found cake. In fact some of her first words were “yummy yums”.

I remember dropping her at her grandparents when she was three.  It was my birthday and I was off shopping. I returned later to find two shattered grandparents, a triumphant child and a magnificently decorated birthday cake.

I was told later she started organising her vision the moment I left.  Her grandparents just got swept up in the almighty tide of her will to bake her mother a cake.

My daughter was born with the understanding of how to create celebration and pleasure in daily life. I resisted her passion and worried about sugar and fat and too much cake.

In time I learnt to stock the pantry with pure, organic ingredients and just let her go for it. If what goes in is wholesome than the cake is not to be feared.

I now understand that cake can be eaten with as much joy as it is baked and life is so much the richer for it.

Healthy start: Kids need the best you can give. Picture: Monkey Business

My brother puts an apple in his kids’ lunches in case an adult ever checks.  He told me he renews the apple every 10,000km.

School lunches can be a bit hit and miss in our house, too. I have good days and bad days. I’d clearly hit a good patch this week.

As I collected my daughter from school for her doctor’s appointment she grabbed her lunch.  As we talked to the doctor she took it out and proceeded to eat it in a most business like fashion.

Usually in a circumstance like this, your child takes out the sticky chocolate donut they talked you in to buying in a weak moment at the supermarket.  The doctor then raises her eyebrows and murmurs something about how the child’s condition may relate to poor diet. She might even hand you a brochure on major food groups.

God has given me children with the dangerous mixture of perfect timing and opportunistic wickedness.  They would probably say something like, “Yeah, Mum it’d be great if we could we have some healthy food.”  Then comes that angelic smile.  Strangling them later in the car park never seems to aid my recovery.  The damage is done.

Now if I were rational I’d have to admit the doctor probably didn’t notice what my daughter was eating on this particular day.  However, for me it was a religious experience – my kid was eating healthy food that I had prepared.

This week I really got my act together and roasted a free-range chook especially for lunches and hunted fresh lettuce and carrots and wholemeal organic bread.

Each morning I’d take out the frozen bread and make a generous chicken sandwich overflowing with long carrot slithers and fresh-cropped lettuce, then some mayo.

These sandwiches are my daughter’s absolute favourite.  There in front of the doctor she chomped away at them. From somewhere there was orchestra music.  My chest swelled with pride.  The angels came down from heaven and crowned me “Mother of the Week”.

Where were the TV cameras?   This was a moment to treasure and relive.  A newspaper headline.  CHILD EATS HEALTHY SCHOOL LUNCH IN FRONT OF FAMILY GP.

Oranges ain't oranges: It pays to know where your food comes from. Picture: Algul

There was a fuss at the markets the other day. It started when my friend Jen asked a stallholder where the oranges came from.  The woman exploded with exasperation.

“Everybody wants to know something!  Where’s this from?  Where’s that from?  People think I’ve got nothing to do but answer questions all day.”

She went on bellowing, “Once you could just have a stall, now it’s a hundred questions!  It’s fruit, lady – you just buy it!”

Jenny was amused and unrepentant. “I don’t care,” she calmly explained, “I’m not buying something from the other side of the world.”

I agree with Jen that there is something really wrong about produce that has clocked up more overseas travel that you have. While it might seem innocent enough to fly an orange several thousand miles there is more to it.

That variety may not be the juiciest, most fabulous orange.  Instead, it may be chosen for its ability to handle jet lag and months in cold storage. Who produces that orange and how it was grown have become invisible to us.  It could have been soaked in DDT and harvested by child slaves for all we know.

As the stall holder said: “Just shut up and buy the orange.”

I am really glad she’s having a tough time running a produce stall these days.  I think anyone in the food industry needs to be prepared to answer a lot more questions.

Consumers are waking from their blissful ignorance.  We are  discovering that those who control food production and supply may not have the interest and health of the customer or the planet as their priority.

Come on, let’s all start asking a lot more questions about what is on the label and how well travelled our produce is.  Our little annoying questions seem to be adding up.

Coming Home to Eat: Wholefood for the Family,
by Jude Blereau

If you care about flavour, family meals, nutrition, your budget and a sustainable food culture – this is your book.  Jude Blereau’s desire to feed both heart and soul manifests itself in these meticulously researched and tested recipes.  No one could ever accuse Jude of being shallow or lacking in passion.

All this attention to detail would be worthless, however, if the food failed to get the thumbs up from the very picky family I cook for.  No problems there, they love the food – it’s that simple.  They have second helpings.

What could be more satisfying than seeing your children enjoy healthy food?  So far my favourite recipe is Cupboard Love Stew, which I have served at two extended family gatherings.  My husband’s favourite is Pirates Pie, which is well worth a trip to the fresh fish market.  We have all enjoyed the cannelloni as well as Mushroom and White Bean Cacciatore.

If you have concerns that wholefood might be too bland or earnest to be enjoyable, this book will make you think again.

Dining dilemma: Homegrown brings its own challenges. Picture: yourpatchorganic.com

It is a humbling day when you realise you can’t feed yourself. No, I haven’t had a stroke or any health crisis.  I am staring at a vegetable garden and I don’t recognise the plants.  This happened to me earlier this year when an organic vegetable patch was installed – yes, installed in my garden.  Not recognising the plants was just the first shock.

Harvest time was the second moment of awakening.  I would watch the vegetables ripen and look so handsome and I didn’t pick them.  I was proud of them – I admired them – like a little art show in my garden.  I seemed to be missing the pathway in my brain that said, “Pick and eat girl”.

Cam our garden man told me not to feel too bad.  He said that it takes a little while to get into the habit of harvesting.  I felt grateful for his generous comments.  Inside I felt like a child.  My vegetables were like a sign in the front garden saying: “Look everybody this woman is as lost as a human can get.”

I am used to a very different path.  The page in the recipe book tells me what I need from the supermarket.  It might be expensive or out of season but hey, it’s in the supermarket and I need it.  I cook, I enjoy.  I am accomplished at this way of preparing and eating food. Until recently I felt safe and confident in the rhythm of modern eating.

Now the garden is telling me what to eat.  Here are my silverbeet, carrots, beans, and lettuce.  This is where the meal needs to begin.

I have no recipe books like this.  I want my garden to come with a recipe book of its own.  What are the 10 ingredients I need to make this a meal?  That is what I am used to.  In my past, the produce has been an incidental part of a blend called meal.

Now I need to cater for a different type of food – the star performer.  It is fresh, it is tasty and it wants to be the main act.  Over a few months of playing this new game I finally come to understand – it deserves to be.  A wise woman told me, “when you cook with organic produce you don’t have to work as hard to make a great meal”.  I learn that she is so right.

It takes me a little while but I start to gain confidence in this more minimalist form of preparing food.  A splash of that, a pinch of this and there is delicious food.  At the same time I start to hunt down other organic ingredients that are recommended to me by wise elders in this mysterious new world.  My family begins a new way of eating.

One morning I am standing in the kitchen chatting to my teenage daughter.  It is the end of winter and I have lost weight.  I show her that my jeans are falling down.  “I just don’t get it, we are eating real butter and full cream milk and I have lost weight.”  “Well Mum,” she replies, as if I asked her the simplest of questions, “When you eat a whole food you don’t need to eat as much.”  I feel like a beginner in my own life.

It is a humbling day when you realise you can’t feed yourself. Surely there is nothing more basic to survival than knowing how to eat.   Like so many other points of transition it takes a low moment to recognise that something needs to change.  A wrong path has been taken. The road to survival is in a different direction.